A Study of Grammatical Constraints of Code-switching among Algerian Arabic and French bilinguals.

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to scrutinize the grammatical constraints of code-switching in Algerian Arabic/French bilinguals’ speech. Three types of grammatical constraints were addressed, the equivalence constraint, the free morpheme constraint and the closed-class constraint. Data were obtained through both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Initially, 60 students of Ibn Khaldoun University Linguistics Class were invited to complete a questionnaire. Then only four participants were selected from the sample to sit for an informal interview based on the topic of this dissertation and their own reflections on their language use. The results indicated that although the participants agreed with the constraints, their answers all gave particularly high levels of acceptability to the sentences violating these three constraints, suggesting that these constraints are not particularly strong in code-switching between Algerian Arabic and French.