Challenging the Free Morpheme and the Equivalence Constraints Counter- Evidence from Algerian Arabic/French Code Switching

Abstract

Within the structural approach to code switching scholarship, linguists’ focus has always been on intra-sentential switching with the aim to formulate grammatical constraints, which govern switching between two different linguistic systems. This paper considered Arabic/French mixed sentences from a structural standpoint and with reference to the free morpheme constraint and the equivalence constraint. The corpus of the study included eighty-nine intra-sentential switches, extracted from different audio-recordings of eight bilingual students. The findings revealed that Arabic-French switching is licensed in different sites within the same sentence/word, and it partially obeys the two constraints. In some cases, the two constraints could perfectly hold. In some other cases, they were invalid nullifying thus universal validity assigned to them earlier by Sankoff and Poplack.

Keywords

• code switching - grammatical constraints - intrasentential switching - morpheme - syntactic violation.