Neutrality conditions in Italian-dialect code switching

The paper aims at demonstrating that in Italian-dialect code switching the concept of neutrality, as stated by Appel and Muysken, plays a central role, both from the sociolinguistic and structural point of view. CS works as a neutral communicative strategy to express a bilingual and bicultural identity. From the structural point of view, many syntactic constraints are neutralized by the structural affinity of the two codes. And this favours a kind of frequent, smooth intrasentential switching as the unmarked choice.