An examination of linguists' attempts to characterize the variety of English used in various articles and novels found that, although they used different criteria for classification, the linguists almost equally (about 30 percent of the time each) either could not identify, correctly identified, or incorrectly identified the variety. (14…

Explores an Optimality-Theoretic approach to account for observed cross-linguistic patterns of code switching that assumes that code switching strives for well-formedness. Optimization of well-formedness in code switching is shown to follow from (violable) ranked constraints. An argument is advanced that code-switching patterns emerge from…