Gardner-Chloros: Code-Switching

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Gardner-Chloros: Switch Reference

Introduction

1. What is code-switching (CS)?

- mixed discourse / mixed language speech / mixed codes

- way of expressing group identity (characteristic accent)

- sociolinguistic environment plays a role

- linguistic and sociolinguistic factors

- CS helps understand identity formation and expression in bilinguals

- CS helps to understand how language is processed and produced in the brain

- CS helps to understand which words/morphemes from languages can easily be combined and which are more resistant/impossible (CS as a signpost for a better understanding of grammar)

- CS helps to understand the division of labour between lexicon and grammar

- most of the world is plurilingual (norm)

- many multilingual areas in the world (e.g. Creole-speaking areas)

- people who speak a regional dialect

- migrants and their descendants

- diglossia (Flemish people)

3. A common-sense approach

- Pragmatic research on CS: conversational functions of CS and its effect on participants

- CS = multifaceted phenomenon

- little agreement about CS, its definition and limits

- different methodological approaches

- we should try to formulate grammatical tendencies instead of absolute rules

- assumptions underlying tried and tested methodological paradigms are often insufficiently discussed (e.g. variationist descriptions of CS)

- widespread belief that all bilingual utterances have an underlying "Matrix Language" (grammatical template = particular language)

- What is a "homogenous" language?

study of CS should force us to think "out of the box" (review methodologies, theoretical approaches and assumptions developed in a monlingual context)

4. The study of code-switching

- Milroy/Muysken (1995): "perhaps the central issue in bilingualism research"

- the significance of CS was overlooked for a long time

- explosion of interest in CS in the last forty years (started with Gumperz in the 1960s)

- multilayered significance of CS (difficulties of studying it)

- CS is "fuzzy-edged": borrowing, syntactic merging, transgression, alternation,

- Muysken (2000): code-mixing = insertion, congruent lexicalization

- Haugen (1956): code-switching (character of the contributing varieties is preserved) vs. interference and integration

- Poplack (1988): code-switching vs. borrowing/nonce borrowing (some measures of convergence)

- Gardner-Chloros/Myers-Scotton: no clear distinction between code-switching and borrowing (diachronic continuum)

- others argue that the distinction has to be decided individually

- Muysken (2000): code-switching (two codes maintain their monolingual characteristics) vs. code-mixing (some convergence)

- Sridhar (1980)/ Bokamba (1988): code-switching (alternation going beyond sentence borders) vs. code-mixing (alternation within the sentence)

- Meisel (1989): code-switching (pragmatic skill of selecting a language according to context) vs. code-mixing (fusion of two grammatical systems)

- social psychology: CS refers to language choices in a bilingual setting

- Pfaff (1979): general term covering all outcomes of contact between two varieties

- CS vs. loanwords, pidgins, mixed languages

7. Speakers' insights

- CS often occurs due to laziness (But: Does it actually involve less or more effort than monolingual speech?)

- even code-switchers disapprove of CS (But: CS does not seem to be connected to education.)

- level of awareness of CS is far beyond the reality of code-switchers

- balanced bilingual = can speak either variety equally competently (CS as deliberate compromise strategy?)

- psycholinguistics: inhibiting one language and the joint activation of two languages requires some effort

- dissociation between how speakers use their linguistic competence and what they know or think they know about it

8. Further types of code-switching

8.1. Tri-/Plurilinguals: the fact of switching once creates the possibility for further switching

advocates a "common sense" approach