loan verbs in arabic and the do-construction
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usually bare infinitives. Elsewhere, the same rule applies. In Persian/ Swedish code-switching, for instance, only Swedish bare infinitives are found, and there are no combinations of nouns with the Persian light verb kardan ‘to do’ (Lotfabbadi 2002). This contrasts with the Arabic loanwords in Persian. Likewise, in Panjabi/English codemixing. the verbs kərna ‘to do’ and hona ‘to be’ are combined with English verbs or noun-verb phrases, whereas the older Arabo-Persian loans in Panjabi that are combined with the same verbs are predominantly nominal (Romaine 1989:120-123). The instances of light verbs with foreign nouns have in common that most of the borrowing takes place or has taken place through written transmission. A parallel might be the case of the Chinese and English loanwords in Korean, discussed by Park (2005). In Korean, the light verb ha is used chiefly with verbal nouns borrowed from Chinese, which presumably derive from a process of written transmission, but in combinations of the light verb with English loanwords, the latter are always verbs, never nouns (Park 1995:351). Likewise, the Arabic loanwords that are used in complex verbs in Persian, Turkish, Panjabi, and Urdu, are always verbal nouns, i.e. nouns with a highly verbal character. The use of light verbs with a (verbal) noun does not qualify as alternation in the sense of Muysken’s (2000) typology of code-mixing, but unlike the DO-construction with infinitives or inflected verbs, it represents a case of insertion. This is confirmed by comparing these instances of borrowing through written transmission with the correlation set up by Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004). They assign the insertion mode of code-mixing to situations of asymmetric proficiency in the superimposed and the community language, while the alternation mode is typical for situations of stable bilingualism. In the case of languages like Persian and Urdu, the only people with any degree of proficiency in (written) Arabic are the Islamic scholars, so that there is a clear asymmetry, and one should expect in such a situation insertion rather than alternation. Not only do DO-constructions occur outside a migratory context, but sometimes, the integration strategy is used in a migratory context. According to Boumans (2007:297, n. 7), the expected DO-construction in Arabic/French code-mixing in France is not used because the speakers use a strategy that was already in place in the homeland. In such a case, one might say that the speakers simply use loan verbs that were already available in their community language. A similar