Code-switching. Grammatical, pragmatic and psycholinguistic aspects

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,5, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: The aim of this paper is to provide a complete overview over the phenomenon of code-switching. In this paper, we will summarize the knowledge currently available on the discourse, linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of code-switching. Such an overview can be used for different purposes: for seminar reports and papers, and for the preparation for exams in linguistics. The first chapter of this paper deals with grammatical/syntactic aspects of code-switching. It is followed by the analysis of the pragmatic/discourse aspects of code-switching. Within the last chapter on psycholinguistic aspects of code-switching we will present some findings of researches on children's acquisition of bilingual speech. Another point of our concern will be the influence of the average bilingual competence on the patterns of code-switching used by bilinguals.