Code-switching between an OV and a VO language: Evidence from German–Italian, German–French and German–Spanish children

The present article investigates intra-sentential code-switching in French/Italian/Spanish-German bilingual children. The main question is what determines the syntax of code-switching in OV/VO structures and subordinate clauses. While in the domain of OV/VO, neither the language of the lexical verb nor that of the modal/auxiliary verb determines the structure of code-switched utterances, the complementizer seems to be decisive for the syntax of code-switching in subordinate clauses. The present approach focuses on the relevance of the functional head C in code-switching, claiming that the syntax of code-switched OV/VO structures is influenced by the language of a (covert) C-head, while it does not depend on the language of T or V. Our approach can explain the variability of OV/VO in code-switching data and supports the observations by Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio (1994), Cantone (2007), Chan (2003; 2007), and Gonzalez-Vilbazo and Lopez (2012) that functional categories play an important role for the syntax of code-switching.

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