Codeswitching and comedy in Catalonia

Many case studies have contributed to the understanding of the extent to which conversational language mixing or codeswitching in bilingual communities is orderly, systematic, and meaningful. A large number of those studies that attempt to move beyond the descriptive and taxonomic draw on two important approaches, one more narrowly linguistic, the other more social in its explanatory assumptions. The first approach is that which identifies syntactic constraints on codeswitching, and takes the sentence as the level of analysis; an important example is Poplack's (1980) "equivalence constraint", which states that the order of sentence consdruents at a switch point must not violate the grammar of either language involved While the emphasis in this perspective has been on constraining rather than facilitating conditions, some attention has nonetheless been given to identifying sentence-level syntactic points that might be particularly vulnerable to codeswitching (ibid., Gumperz 1982).