Empirical Inadequacy of the Functional Head Constraint

Evidence from Urdu/English Code-switching

Abstract

Employing both naturalistic and elicited Urdu/English code-switching (CS) data, this paper attempts to expose the empirical inadequacy of the Functional Head Constraint (FHC) which, Belazi, Rubin and Toribio (1994) claim, is supposed to make valid empirical predictions across different language-pairs. Following Abney’s (1987) distinction between functional and lexical categories and Chomsky's (1993) f-selection as one of a group of feature checking processes, Belazi et al., (1994) posit that since functional heads and their f-selected complements must have a matching language feature, CS between functional heads and their f-selected complements is disallowed. Formalized as the FHC, this structural relation between functional heads and their complements, according to Belazi et al., (1994), restricts CS between C and TP, T and vP, v and VP, and D and NP. However, the FHC has been found to make inconsistent empirical predictions regarding CS between different functional heads and their complements in the context of Urdu/English CS. Not only does the FHC predict certain grammatical sentences to be ungrammatical, it also licenses certain ungrammatical sentences. It is found to incorrectly predict CS between D and its f-selected complement NP as demonstrated by the data (8)-(12), C and its f-selected complement TP as demonstrated by the data (13)-(18), and v and its f-selected complement VP as demonstrated by the data (19)-(22). Like the FHC, its addendum the Word Grammar Integrity Corollary (WGIC) has also been found to be empirically inadequate; the placement of English Adjs at positions which are not licensed by English as documented in the data (23)-(26) constitute counter-examples and expose the empirical inadequacy of the WGIC.