Standing on the shoulders of giants

In this paper I explore how collaborative work conducted with colleagues has built on previous work to arrive at an enhanced understanding not only of what code-switching is, but also how norms for its use can vary from community to community. Following an overview of our theoretical approach and of our main results I will try to trace the influence of previous work to show how key developments in twentieth century linguistics allowed us to make the progress we were able to achieve. We shall see how our current understanding has developed from pioneering early work on the notions of the speech community and linguistic repertoire, as well as on initial and subsequent attempts to formulate ‘rules’ of code-switching.