Complex items and units in extra sentential code switching: Spanish and English in Gibraltar

As is well-known, code-mixing is particularly frequent at clause boundaries and with elements expressing pragmatic meaning. However, most of the literature has focussed on switching of simple elements such as conjunctions and discourse markers. This paper, in contrast, analyses clause peripheral switching involving two complex constructions: left dislocations and pseudo-clefts. The data are from English-Spanish bilingual conversations recorded in Gibraltar. A great majority of the bilingual constructions in the corpus belong to a few types occurring with a restricted set of lexical items. A vast amount of such highly recurrent strings in the data confirm the hypothesis that complex multi word strings that are switched together constitute units in code-mixing, i.e. they are processed as single lexical items.