“Irregular mixture of two distinct systems” (Labov, 1971, p. 457). This afirmation reflects what has been thought for decades about a linguistic behavior common in bilingual speakers: code-switching. This phenomenon, characterized by the change from one language to another without any change of topic or speaker, is, however, systematically organized and is subject to grammatical constraints, occurring at specific points and repeated in sentences, it is not random. One of the commonly used theoretical models to account for the grammaticality of code-switching has been proposed by Poplack (1978/1881), which suggests two constraints on the phenomenon: the “free morpheme constraint”, whereby the switch can occur after any constituent unless it is a fixed morpheme, and the “equivalence constraint”, which predicts the occurrence at points where the elements of both languages are equivalent, so there is no violation of syntactic rules of languages involved. This study presents the application of this model to a descriptive analysis of code-switching between Portuguese and Parkatêjê, a Timbira language spoken in southeastern of Pará. The data that support this study are traditional stories of the people, collected between the years 2008 and 2011, in which we can find many instances of the phenomenon.
|
