The syntactic patterns of code-switching in Ekegusii-English

Résumé 0

This research was carried out to identify the syntactic patterns of code-switching in Ekegusii English and any syntactic constraint on the code-switch that there may be. What is meant by constraint here is that two elements in a sentence cannot collocate if they are in two different codes because the construction would be ungrammatical. Data (code-switch utterances) was collected from a total of 43 (forty three) Ekegusli English speakers and it was supplemented by the researcher's intuitive code-switch constructions. The results revealed that there exist certain syntactic constraints on code-switching. The findings were grouped into two, that is, code-switch patterns and code-switch constraints. These were further grouped according to the sequence of the codes, i.e Ekegusii => English and English => Ekegusii. In the Ekegusii => English sequence, a total of 21 (twenty one) patterns were identified while the constraints numbered 16 (sixteen). English-Ekegusil had 20 (twenty) patterns with 10 (ten) constraint structures. The Ekegusil English constraints were compared with those of other code-switches. Ekegusih English had seven constraints in common with Spanish-English,three with Russian-French, one with Yoruba-English and five out of the seven claimed to be universal with a few exceptions in some of the constraints.