The International Journal of Bilingualism

With a functional grammatical approach this paper explores how codeswitching data manifest iconicity and structure. Codeswitching is here considered a linguistic mode, and thus a semiotic process. The objective is to place codeswitching within language as such, that is as a systematic, linguistic phenomenon which participates functionally in the grammatical structuring of linguistic constructions. Data comprise Turkish-Danish bilingual teenagers ’ group conversa-tions. The different instances of codeswitching are categorized and presented in the form of a typology which is organized with a primary weight on iconicity. Iconicity alone however cannot explain or motivate every instance of codeswitching, and consequently the interaction between iconicity and structure is also investigated. It is shown that most types of codeswitching are far from arbitrary when both form and content are taken into consideration, and exactly this instantiates codeswitching as an expression parameter with a (grammatical) function.