The paper discusses what codeswitching how it operates in Yorùbá-English discourse, within the MLF

What is it about?

This paper investigates the division of labour1 operative in naturally occurring bilingual discourse. It attempts to establish the grammar of intersentential codeswitching (ISC) in mixed Yoruba-English interrogative sentences. The paper seeks to find out what constitutes the asymmetry between the participating languages (Yoruba and English), as they supply important grammatical structures in order to produce a well-formed mixed YORÙBÁ English interrogative sentences. Asymmetry in the division of labour is *We gratefully appreciate the invaluable comments of the anonymous reviewers on the previous versions of this paper. But for those comments, the improvement of this paper would not have been possible. This paper has been improved upon very much, but we doubt if it is up to the expectations of the reviewers. Special thanks to our very good friend (whom we’ve never met!), Ms Younha Lee, Editorial Assistant, Journal of Cognitive Science, Institute for Cognitive Science, Seoul National University, Korea (ROK) for her great assistance, understanding, patience and words of encouragement which gave the courage to go on, especially during the office fire incident when there seemed to be no hope. 1 This social science term was borrowed from Myers’-Scotton (2009: 81) To us, this metaphor beautifully describes what operates in codeswitching when two languages are used in a discourse to supply the morpho-syntactic structure observed in two ways: first between the type of morpheme involved in the switch (content or system morpheme, depending on whether they assign/ receive thematic roles or they do not), and second, how the morphemes are assigned roles and this depends on which language is the Matrix Language (ML) and which is the Embedded Language (EL).

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Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The paper observes that in YorubaEnglish bilingual speech, when uniformity of structure is juxtaposed with asymmetry, structures of the ML are preferred according to the MLF principles (Myers-Scotton 1993; and Myers-Scotton 2011). The paper argues that even in this not-so-much investigated area of codeswitching in mixed Yoruba-English sentences, in the code switching structure, the ML is invariably Yoruba and as a consequence determines the permissible and non-permissible combinations for well-formed structures, contrary to what some scholars have claimed

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