Resumen de The Status of Nouns in Yanito: Borrowings or Code-Switches?
This paper tries to elucidate one of the most important methodological problems in the study of syntactic constraints on codeswitching, which is the distinction between borrowings (i.e.
integrated forms into the recipient language) and code-switches (i.e. non-integrated forms neither morphologically nor syntactically into the embedded language). In particular, I focus on English nouns in the Spanish/English bilingual discourse in Gibraltar, or what is known as Yanito.
Following the variationist comparative method developed by Poplack and her team of researchers, I examine the gender and number marking on these items at the morphological level and determination and adjective placement at the syntactic level, and I compare them to their counterparts in unmixed Spanish, unmixed English and unambiguous code-switches. In contrast to previous approaches, the application of this procedure to Yanito reveals that most of these items are code-switches and only a small subset can be considered as borrowings
