Patterns of Codeswitching in Mixed Yoruba-English Interrogative Sentences

This paper investigates the division of labour1 operative in naturallyoccurring bilingual discourse. It attempts to establish the grammar ofintersentential codeswitching (ISC) in mixed Yoruba-English interrogativesentences. The paper seeks to find out what constitutes the asymmetry betweenthe participating languages (Yoruba and English), as they supply importantgrammatical structures in order to produce a well-formed mixed Yoruba-English interrogative sentences. Asymmetry in the division of labour isobserved in two ways: first between the type of morpheme involved in the switch (content or system morpheme, depending on whether they assign/receive thematic roles or they do not), and second, how the morphemes areassigned roles and this depends on which language is the Matrix Language (ML)and which is the Embedded Language (EL). The paper observes that in Yoruba-English bilingual speech, when uniformity of structure is juxtaposed withasymmetry, structures of the ML are preferred according to the MLF principles(Myers-Scotton 1993; and Myers-Scotton 2011). The paper argues that even inthis not-so-much investigated area of codeswitching in mixed Yoruba-Englishsentences, in the code switching structure, the ML is invariably Yoruba and asa consequence determines the permissible and non-permissible combinationsfor well-formed structures, contrary to what some scholars have claimed.