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Grammar
In studying the syntactic and morphological patterns of language alternation, linguists have postulated specific grammatical rules and specific syntactic boundaries for where code-switching might occur.

Types
Scholars use different names for various types of code-switching.


 * Intersentential switching occurs outside the sentence or the clause level (i.e. at sentence or clause boundaries). It is sometimes called "extrasentential" switching.
 * Intra-sentential switching occurs within a sentence or a clause.
 * Tag-switching is the switching of either a tag phrase or a word, or both, from one language to another, (common in intra-sentential switches).
 * Intra-word switching occurs within a word itself, such as at a morpheme boundary.

Most code-switching studies primarily focus on intra-sentential switching, as it creates many hybrid grammar structures that require explanation. The other types involve utterances that simply follow the grammar of one language or the other.

Sankoff and Poplack's Model
David Sankoff and Shana Poplack's model of code-switching is the most thorough in accounting for alternational code-switching, in which a new grammar emerges that is a combination of the grammars of the two individual languages involved. In this model, code-switching is subject to two constraints: the free-morpheme constraint and the equivalence constraint.

The Free-Morpheme Constraint
The free-morpheme constraint stipulates that code-switching cannot occur between a lexical stem and bound morphemes. Essentially, this constraint distinguishes code-switching from borrowing. Generally, borrowing occurs in the lexicon, while code-switching occurs at either the syntax level or the utterance-construction level.

The Equivalence Constraint
This constraint predicts that switches occur only at points where the surface structures of the languages coincide, or between sentence elements that are normally ordered in the same way by each individual grammar. For example, the sentence: "I like you porque eres simpático" ("I like you because you are nice") is allowed because it obeys the syntactic rules of both Spanish and English.

Weaknesses
The free-morpheme and equivalence constraints are insufficiently restrictive, meaning there are numerous exceptions that occur. For example, the free morpheme constraint does not account for why switching is impossible between certain free morphemes. The sentence: "The students had visto la película italiana" ("The students had seen the Italian movie") does not occur in Spanish-English code-switching, yet the free-morpheme constraint would seem to posit that it can. The equivalence constraint would also rule out switches that occur commonly in languages, as when Hindi postpositional phrases are switched with English prepositional phrases like in the sentence: "John gave a book ek larakii ko" ("John gave a book to a girl"). The Functional Head Constraint developed by Belazi et al. is another constraint-based theory that sought to remedy this problem. It holds that code-switching cannot occur between a functional head (a complementizer, a determiner, an inflection, etc.) and its complement (sentence, noun-phrase, verb-phrase). Even still, the Sankoff and Poplack model as well as the Functional Head Constraint only identify points at which switching is blocked, as opposed to explaining which constituents can be switched and why.

The Matrix Language-Frame Model
Carol Myers-Scotton's Matrix Language-Frame model is the dominant model of insertional code-switching, which involves "the insertion of elements from one language into the morphosyntactic frame of the other." The MLF model posits that there is a Matrix Language (ML) and an Embedded Language (EL). The hypotheses are as follows (Myers-Scotton 1993b: 7):
 * The ML Hypothesis: The ML sets the morphosyntactic frame for ML+EL constituents. Morpheme order must not violate ML morpheme order. All syntactically relevant system morphemes must come from the ML.
 * The Blocking Hypothesis: The ML blocks the appearance of any EL content morphemes which do not meet certain congruency conditions with ML counterparts.
 * The EL Island Trigger Hypothesis: Whenever an EL morpheme appears which is not permitted under either the ML hypothesis or the blocking hypothesis, the constituent containing it must be completed as an obligatory EL island.
 * The EL Implicational Hierarchy Hypothesis: Optional EL islands occur; generally they are only those constituents which are either formulaic or idiomatic or peripheral to the main arguments of the sentence.