The words of Labov (1972, 457) illustrate the issue of how grammatical rules govern switching from language to another: ‘no one has been able to show that such rapid alternation is governed by any systematic rules or constraints and we must therefore describe it as the irregular mixture of two distinct systems’. An issue which has involved research over several decades, and has become known as code switching (CS). Indeed, CS is no longer considered as an idiosyncratic linguistic behavior. Rather, it is full of apparent and hidden patterns. Code switching is not simply a set of sounds, words and structures. It emanates from the larger domain of society and culture, and at the same time reaches into of human interaction. CS is not simply a structural property of the collectivity—a lect used exclusively by members of particular group. It is manipulated by the individual producer of multiple discourses through intentional ideology (Aabi and Karama 2019).

Every use of language reflects its speaker’s social and linguistic experiences characteristic of his/her own sociolinguistic background. Therefore, CS instances must draw their structure and function upon the discourse types and linguistic mosaic, which are realized in them. Every discourse, social and linguistic, consists of a set of schemes that plan a systematic structuring of two or more languages following the particular social, pragmatic and cognitive organization of, what Muysken (2013, 716) calls, the ‘intention to switch’ expressed in the code switching instance.

As to what underlines or regulates these patterns, it has not been settled by researchers. A great deal of CS research to identify or explain these patterns has roots in syntactic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches. While each approach rather complements the other, any attempt to describe CS naturally calls on distinctively different perspectives. Thus, the main aim of this book is to carry out a syntactic study of code switching in the Moroccan situation. It intends to examine the grammatical constraints governing Moroccan Arabic/French and Moroccan/Standard Arabic bilingual conversations and to integrate and develop a framework for the study of code switching.

Although work on code switching in the Moroccan situation has been ongoing for over four decades, none has researched the subject of syntactic constraints in the Moroccan/Standard Arabic situation. As to the Moroccan Arabic/French situation, several studies have been carried out, but only few of them have dealt with the subject of syntactic constraints, and these will be discussed in the course of this book as a contribution to the ongoing research on the study of code switching in general and code switching in the Moroccan context in particular. The book reviews syntactic constraints that regulate the code switching occurrences between different language sets and expands the discussion to the Moroccan context. It provides another brick to build on in understanding the grammatical constraints of code switching, specifically between Moroccan Arabic/French and Moroccan Arabic/Standard Arabic.

The theoretical framework of the analysis to be undertaken in the present book is the assertion guiding much work on language contact that equivalence between the grammars of two languages facilitates code switching. Underlying this assertion is the assumption that in language contact situations, code switching is constrained in the same way, and only by cross-linguistic variation. Proposals to define cross-linguistic variation or equivalence in the case of code switching have generated different views establishing both language specific constraints and universal constraints (Yi Du 2016, 49). Along this divide, researchers either posited constraints which tend to be specific to code switching or advocated rules that follow from the general principles which govern language as a whole.

The view adopted in this regard is uniform in its conception of constraints for both monolingual and bilingual constructions. It follows from syntactic theory that language is a set of principles and parameters. It also builds on the assumption that code switching is governed by the equivalence paradigm, which requires some kind of congruity between the two languages involved in the switch. Given these two assumptions, principles will not, therefore, constrain code switching, in view of the fact that they are universals innately and identically endowed in all speakers of any natural language. Parameters, on the other hand, represent the cross-linguistically variant (i.e., non-equivalent) areas between two or more languages, and must therefore be constraining in nature to code switching (Aabi 2004). Parameters are associated with specific properties of functional categories, such as determiners and inflections, as opposed to lexical categories, which are conceptually selected entries existing invariantly in all human languages and which therefore belong to the set of universals rather than parameters (Ouhalla 1991; Roberts and Roussou 2003; Morapedi 2018).

Naturally occurring data from conversations of Moroccan Arabic/French and Moroccan/Standard Arabic bilinguals has been collected in order to examine these issues within this book. The choice of the two language sets is motivated by the fact that the author is a speaker of three languages, which allows him to have a sense of language and code switching, a sense which often translates into accurate intuitions about the way languages work in contact situations.

The approach adopted for the analysis of the corpus is largely interpretive in nature. Quantitative data is presented to support the qualitative results and illustrate statistically the switching frequency of specific categories in order to discard what some researchers (Goldrick et al. 2016) refer to as atypical instances. Although frequencies are presented, the approach remains primarily qualitative as the data is analyzed against the pre-posed hypothesis, and in comparison with what has been advanced in previous studies of code switching. In this regard, as Grewswell (2009) posits, a qualitative approach or design must demonstrate that the context of data collection is natural. In the context of the present corpus, criteria to ensure favorable conditions for naturally occurring bilingual conversations are set and rigorously observed. When identifying the language of a category is not straightforward in the process of data description, the criterion of monolingual accessibility is used by relying on judges who are native speakers of Moroccan Arabic with no formal education whatsoever and rarely exposed to other languages.

The book consists of nine chapters including the present introduction. In Chapter 2, I will take the controversial issue of the distinction between (i) code switching and the other language contact phenomena of interference, borrowing and dialect switching, and (ii) between different types of code switching, namely insertional , alternational and fusional , with the aim to unify some of the earlier views on the subject. Chapter 3 will sketch briefly the background against which the book is set by introducing the linguistic situation in Morocco and a review of earlier studies on code switching in the Moroccan context. Chapter 4 will present a critical review of different approaches to code switching in the light of the Moroccan corpus as well as language sets from other studies. Chapter 5 will provide the theoretical foundations for the analysis to be carried out later in Chapters 7 and 8. It will set out the main theoretical tenets of the study as the Functional Parameter Constraint : The FPC, arguing that code switching, like monolingual constructions, is constrained by parametric values of functional categories. Chapter 6 will report on the nature of the participants and reflect on the findings from practice. Chapter 7 will be devoted to the analysis of Moroccan Arabic/French switching found in the corpus using the theoretical framework laid out in Chapter 5. A similar analysis will be carried out on Moroccan/Standard Arabic switching in Chapter 8, which will also explore the applicability of the concept of code mixing in the Moroccan/Standard Arabic contact situation. The findings obtained from the analysis will lead to the final chapter, which will provide a restatement of the strengths as well as the challenges of the FPC.