Complex Items and Units in Extra-Sentential Code Switching. Spanish and English in Gibraltar

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