Review article Searching for syntactic explanations of code switching1 LOUIS BOUMANS Helena Halmari: Government and Codeswitching. Explaining American Finnish. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1997. As its title indicates, this study is designed to offer a syntactic explanation of code switching, rather than being a sociolinguistic or ethnographic account of a Finnish American community. A precursor of this study was published in Linguistics (Halmari 1993). In the following review, I will first locate this book in the context of code-switching (CS ) studies. Then, after an overview of the book’s contents, my assessment of Halmari’s proposals is organized around five topics: government relations, the role of the subject phrase, the demarcation of CS from borrowing, a compari- son of the government constraint (GC ) with insertion models of CS, and the applicability of the GC in CS with other language pairs. Finally I will make some suggestions for a more generally applicable approach to the syntactic regularities in CS. 1. Research on the grammatical properties of CS Since the 1960s the study of code switching, that is, the alternate use of two or more languages within one and the same discourse, has been a flourishing branch of linguistics. Most studies fall into one of the following two cate- gories: sociolinguistic studies that try to explain language choice in a particu- lar situation as a result of social motivations, and grammatical studies that concentrate on the syntactic and morphological regularities found in mixed sentences. On the basis of the type of explanation put forward, the latter branch of code-switching studies can be divided into three approaches. In 1981 Sankoff and Poplack attracted much attention with their ‘‘equivalence constraint,’’ which allows for code switching in case of parallel left-to-right word order in both languages. We may refer to this type of explanation as Linguistics 39–2 (2001), 437–453 0024–3949/01/0039–0437 © Walter de Gruyter