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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 codeswitching 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 wellformedness 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 + 42 +
