An OT Approach To The Morphosyntactic Features Of Chinese/English Codeswitching

It is believed in the research field of codeswitching (CS) that where in an utterance a speaker might switch might not be simply a whim of individual speakers or even a matter of habit for a specific speech community. In other words, there are grammatical constraints on codeswitching, though the question of what they are is still disputable.The present thesis attempts to (i) present an adequate description of the morphosyntactic features of Chinese/English codeswitching; (ii) provide an adequate explanation for those features within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT).The subject of this thesis is intrasentential Chinese/English codeswitching because there is no interaction between language systems in switches above the sentence level. Specially, this thesis focuses on the intrasentential Chinese/English switched forms that are unlikely or impossible to occur for the phenomenon of codeswitching is influenced by many other factors like grammatical constraints, social factors, psychological factors, and etc. The description and explanation of Chinese/English codeswitching morphosyntactic features is presented in Chapter Four and Five respectively.