Some examples of Serbian/English bilingual code-switching

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse bilingual code-switching from a corpus of two recorded 60-minute conversations involving Serbian/English bilingual speakers. In order to determine a level of agreement with the findings of various authors who propose universally applicable `rules` of code-switching, the paper starts off with a syntactic analysis of the material with occasional notes on semantic and morphological aspects of switchable constituents, and moves to a more conversational approach to examine the functions of code-switching. Although established general rules prove to be a helpful framework for the investigation, deviations from these are identified and interpreted throughout the paper.