Towards an integrated approach to structural and conversational aspects of code-switching through macrosociolinguistic predictors

Accounts of CS have typically been undertaken either from a purely grammatical perspective or from a purely pragmatic perspective, whereas both perspectives could in actual fact usefully complete one another. This chapter takes the view that grammatical and pragmatic typologies of CS deserve to be joined, with the purpose of not only producing a more comprehensive typology, but also of offering the opportunity to use one specific pragmatic type as a predictor of one specific grammatical type, or the other way round. On the basis of a corpus of spoken data collected in different South African sociological settings and involving Afrikaans, English and Sesotho, we empirically test the co-occurrence of grammatical and pragmatic types of CS, before reaching conclusions on the extent to which grammatical and pragmatic features of CS can be described jointly, while being predictable on the basis of (socio-)linguistic factors.