Description and aim
This workshop will combine expertise in linguistic and
psycholinguistic approaches and methods to generate fundamental new insights
and a more complete understanding of code-switching. In order to tackle these
issues, invited participants are empirically and theoretically complementary.
The urgency of such a workshop stems from what seems to be a current impasse in
code-switching research, with contradictory evidence for different theoretical
positions with no overarching principle that can organize current empirical
findings. Studying each language pair alone or using one particular paradigm
will not tell us much: it is all the elements together that compose the picture
of what code-switching is, like the tiles of a gigantic puzzle. Hence, an added
value of this workshop is that it allows us to combine and contrast data from
different communities, to join expertise in linguistics and psycholinguistics
and to study both children and adults to characterize the typology, distribution
and frequency of code-switched structures. The workshop will be a unique
opportunity to start synchronizing methods between groups and approaches, in an
integrative fashion, such that limitations identified in some subdomains (e.g.,
sociolinguistics) can shape the approach in others (e.g.,
psycholinguistics).