Code-Switching Among Ga-English Speakers: A Grammatical Analysis

Abstract

This study is a structural examination of Ga-English code-switched utterances among native Ga speakers. It seeks to find out the nature and structure of code-switching as it occurs among family members within the family setting. As such, data for the study was collected from selected people within a family. All the participants are balanced bilinguals and literate in both languages. The analysis involved mainly an examination of the morpheme distribution patterns within the Nominal and Verbal Groups of the code-switched utterances as well as how prepositions perform in the code-switched structures. Adverbial Groups and conjunctions were also briefly examined. The theoretical framework used is the 4-M model of Carol Myers-Scotton (2002) and the grammatical theory of the Systemic Functional Grammar. It was observed that, per the 4-M model’s assumption, content morphemes are the main English items in the corpus. System morphemes are mostly supplied by Ga and their switch is subject to the principles of the differential access hypothesis. Secondly, the research sought to find out whether differences exist between the Ga only syntactic structures and the code-switched syntactic structures. The results reveal that there are fundamental differences in both the Nominal Group and the Verbal Group of both structures, as well as within the switching of prepositions and conjunctions. The structure of the utterances may be predictive, particularly in the Nominal and Verbal Groups as the position of morphemes are easily identified and recur over and over again.