The Castillian-Portuguese interface in Misiones, Argentina: test zone for language alternation

Abstract

This article presents the results of three interactive experiments carried out among bilingual speakers (Castillian-Portuguese) in the Argentinian province of Misiones, in order to investigate if some of the syntactic restrictions postulated for the intra-sentence code switching are also valid for so similar languages. The key contexts for language switching are: after subject pronouns, negative and interrogative, and between auxiliar verb and infinitive. The results suggest a correlation between partial permeability of syntactic restrictions and genealogical distance.