Distinguishing language contact phenomena: evidence from Finnish‐English bilingualism

Using a variationist, i.e. accountable, approach to the study of code‐switching, this paper attempts to validate the equivalence contraint on intrasentential code‐switching on the basis of natural speech data from two typologically different languages, Finnish and English. Though the data include many apparent exceptions to the constraint, the authors show how these are resolved by distinguishing on the one hand between code‐switching and borrowing, and on the other between the different functions code‐switching fulfills in the discourse.