‘embedded’ language (EL). The ML can be defined as the language which pro-
vides the morphosyntactic frame for the clause. The EL provides inserted mate-
rial consisting of mostly content words – that is words that carry the meaning
expressed (e.g. nouns, adjectives) rather than words that signal the grammati-
cal relationship between words (e.g. articles, pronouns). The principles which
are used to identify the ML and EL in a given clause are explained below.
The Complementizer Phrase (CP) as the unit of analysis
In the most recent version of the MLF, Myers-Scotton (2002: 54) states
that the unit of analysis is the CP, which she defines as the ‘syntactic struc-
ture expressing the predicate-argument structure of a clause’. A CP therefore
roughly corresponds to a clause. A bilingual CP or clause is one that contains
bilingual constituents (Myers-Scotton, 2002: 56), including other CPs (i.e. a
complex clause with embedded clauses), as we can see in example (1) below:
(1) [CP[CP 1 f(ydd)en i (y)n hoffi
be-1S-COND^2 PRON-1S PRT like-INF
[CP 2 swim-o gyda sharks]]]
swim-INF with
‘I would like to swim with sharks.’ (Fusser 27)This example consists of one complex CP which contains two CPs inside
it, CP 1 and CP 2.
CP 1 is what is normally known as the main clause or CP, whereas CP 2 is
the (nonfinite) subordinate clause. It is worth noticing that a bilingual CP is
not only a CP with bilingual constituents; the constituents may be monolin-
gual themselves but the constituents may be in different languages.
Jake et al. (2002: 73) claim that ‘the ML may change within successive
CPs, even within a multi-clausal sentence, but we stress that the ML does
not change within a single bilingual CP’.
Identifying the matrix language
Myers-Scotton (2002: 59) suggests that two principles can be used to
identify the ML in a clause: the System Morpheme Principle (SMP) and
Morpheme Order Principle (MOP).
The SMP states that the ML sources outside late system morphemes or
‘late outsiders’, which are morphemes that have ‘grammatical relations exter-
nal to their head constituent’^3 (Myers-Scotton, 2002: 59) and thus have to
‘look outside’ their maximal projection for information about their grammati-
cal form.^4 Finite verb morphology is an example of a late outsider morpheme,
as verbal morphology is dependent on the subject constituent (which lies out-
side the verbal constituent) for information about its form, such as person and
number. Other types of system morphemes (which might include uninflected
determiners, conjunctions, etc.), as well as content morphemes, can come from
Factors Influencing Code-Switching 113