Abstract
Naturally occurring Finnish-English bilingual conversations are examined to discover the principle constraining the distribution of intra-sentential code- switching. It is argued that the syntactic notion of government is the relevant one, in particular Di Sciullo, Muysken, and Singh's (1986) Government Constraint (GC) on code-switching, according to which code-switching within a governed element is possible if and only if the governed element includes a "language-carrier" whose language index is identical with the language index of the governor. In governed positions the rich Finnish inflectional morphology functions as language-carrier. Evidence for the GC is provided not only by the data that conform to the constraint, but also by those data which are near- violations of this constraint and consistently accompanied by severe repair phenomena (pausing, hesitation, false starts, and backtracking. It is claimed that these repair phenomena 'break' the government relation when it is about to be violated. In a few instances an explanation for code-switching needs to be looked for in sociolinguistic factors, such as interspeaker variation.
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