Complementing in another language Prosody and code-switching

In English-Spanish code-switching, the main and complement clause boundary is a site of variable equivalence between languages. Whereas the complementiser is always present in Spanish, in English it is only sometimes present, giving rise to a quantitative word string mismatch at this juncture. Comparisons with monolingual benchmarks reveal no grammatical convergence of the contact varieties in finite complementation patterns. Rather, prosody provides a solution to variable equivalence. Whereas main and complement clauses tend to be prosodically integrated by occurring in the same Intonation Unit in unilingual speech, the opposite is true when there is code-switching at the clause boundary. Prosodic distancing of the two languages at junctures of variable equivalence is thus a bilingual strategy for code-switching between separate grammars.