# Grammatical Constraints on Intra-sentential Code-Switching: From Theories to Working Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.04538 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.04538/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [A Survey of Code-switching: Linguistic and Social Perspectives for Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01967/) (2023)
- [From Machine Translation to Code-Switching: Generating High-Quality Code-Switched Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06483/) (2021)
- [CodeMixBench: Evaluating Code-Mixing Capabilities of LLMs Across 18 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18791/) (2025)
- [Code-Switched Text Synthesis in Unseen Language Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16724/) (2023)
- [Linguistics Theory Meets LLM: Code-Switched Text Generation via Equivalence Constrained Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22660/) (2024)
- [Attributional Safety Failures in Large Language Models under Code-Mixed Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14469/) (2025)
- [Can Large Language Models Understand, Reason About, and Generate Code-Switched Text?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07153/) (2026)
- [Mixed-Distil-BERT: Code-mixed Language Modeling for Bangla, English, and Hindi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10272/) (2023)
- [Prompting Towards Alleviating Code-Switched Data Scarcity in Under-Resourced Languages with GPT as a Pivot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17216/) (2024)
- [Methods of Automatic Matrix Language Determination for Code-Switched Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02521/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We make one of the first attempts to build working models for intra-sentential code-switching based on the Equivalence-Constraint (Poplack 1980) and Matrix-Language (Myers-Scotton 1993) theories. We conduct a detailed theoretical analysis, and a small-scale empirical study of the two models for Hindi-English CS. Our analyses show that the models are neither sound nor complete. Taking insights from the errors made by the models, we propose a new model that combines features of both the theories.