Oldal 44 [44]
CHAPTER 4 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
evidence, he presumes that there is a universal grammar that “determines
and perhaps delimits the range of ‘grammatical’ code-switched utterances in
a given bilingual context”’”’. Therefore, the question is not “whether there are
any structural constraints on code-switching, but rather what is the best way
to characterize them”'’. As a leeway out of the dichotomy between previous
theories emerging along two lines — between those which attempt to set
up universal rules based on empirical generalizations to explain how code¬
switching works, and those which claim that the structural rules governing
code-switching should always be examined in the relation of the codes actually
switched — Bhatt sets “violable (soft) constraints much in the spirit of OT".
Bhatt collected all universal constraints noted as empirical generalizations in
previous studies and turned them into a set of universal constraints governing
the structural rules of well-formedness in code-switching. Bhatt claims that
“there are no rules of code-switching per se”, only universal constraints of
which interactions the patterns of code-switching emerge. The constraints are
soft, violable and ranked in a strict dominance hierarchy. “All possible output
representations for a given input are examined by a set of (violable) ranked
constraints ... The optimal, harmonic, output representation is the one that
has the least serious constraint violations”.
In other words, in the spirit of OT, the candidates (inputs or underlying
representations) competing for being selected the optimal candidate (the
output or the surface realization) go through a set of structural constraints,
evolving from cross-linguistic evidence, which governs the rules of well¬
formedness in code-switching. The constraints are universal, but the strict
hierarchy that arranges them into an order of ranking is always language-pair
specific, depending on the interaction of the switched codes. The constraints
can be violated, but the optimal candidate can never violate the one posited
as the highest one in a particular speech production process.
OT in bilingual use is a universally applicable theoretical framework for
exploring the structural mechanism in code-switching. It is universally
applicable because it does not claim — contrary to previous studies — that
there are universal rules of code-switching, of which counter-evidence has
constantly been provided in the literature, but it only sets violable constraints,
which govern well-formedness in code-switching. As these constraints are
universal but ordered in a specific ranking with respect to the structural
223-251
Bhatt, Code-switching, constraints, and optimal grammars, Lingua, 224
103 Bhatt, Ibid., 224
104 Bhatt, Ibid., 224
105 Bhatt, Ibid., 236
102
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