Code-switching, lexico-grammatical features and loan translation: Data from a large Macedonian-English corpus

This paper looks at the speech of bilinguals, in this case a group of 103 Macedonian-Australians and focuses on code-switching in a lexical sense, e.g. embedding, insertion, alternation, referring to lexical material that is transferred across languages, regardless of length. Two- or multi-item constructions as a code-switching related phenomenon are investigated, especially the role of light-verb constructions. Lexico-grammatical and lexico-semantic influence (via loan translation) is examined to see whether imported lexical items co-occur with and appear to precipitate structural innovations.