Linguistic effects on the contact between Greek and Bulgarian languages for recent Bulgarian immigrants to Northern Greece

This study presents the results of an analysis of code-switching behavior observed in bilingual Bulgarian-Greek conversations. On the basis of eight hours of recorded conversations with eight participants, a corpus of 234 instances of intra-sentential code-switching were extracted with the complementizer phrase being a unit of analysis. All these instances are analyzed structurally in accordance with the Matrix Language Framework. Code-switching patterns are also discussed in relation to the shared features within the Balkan Sprachbund to which both Bulgarian and Greek belong. The structural analysis focuses on instances of lexical insertions and more specifically, pays attention to single-switch morpheme such as the definite article. It is found that variation between the Bulgarian and Greek definite article combined with Greek noun is probably determined by the language of the preceding lexical item.