The proposal, couched in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993), is premised on the assumption that the proposed universal constraints are prioritized: they are defeasible, but only in those contexts in which they conflict with another, presumably higher ranked, constraint. Based on this cross-linguistic data, we propose universal constraints on codeswitching which restrict the range of syntactic permutations of code-switches to all and only those that are grammatical. This paper provides a comparative-syntactic account of the properties of code-switching among languages such as Kashmiri-English, Hindi-English, Kashmiri-Hindi, and the much discussed Spanish-English (Poplack, 1980 among others) and Swahili-English (Myers-Scotton, 1993a). Although several constraints have been proposed in the past to record the grammatical properties of code-switching, the claimed status of their ‘universality’ has often been questioned.
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