A comparative analysis of Romanian-English and Romanian-Spanish code-switching patterns

The present study compares Romanian-Spanish and Romanian-English code-switch patterns at a morpho-syntactic level. Spanish and Romanian have similar grammatical features and share many structural and phonological properties, while Romanian and English differ in most of these aspects. In comparing 240 code-switches from both language pairs, I address whether these differences and similarities in code-switch patterns can be explained by typological factors. The results show that switch points in both language pairs are the same at phrase level. However, different CS patterns occur at morpheme-level, with Romanian-Spanish switches showing more complex combinations between Spanish stems and Romanian inflectional or function morphemes, than in the Romanian-English data. These findings shed light on the role of feature matching between switched categories and the effect of typological similarity. Adapted from the source document