Codeswitching Worldwide. I

277 Pages·1997·8.62 MB·English

by  Rodolfo Jacobson

Codeswitching Worldwide
W
DE
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Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 106
Editor
Werner Winter
Μ out on de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Codeswitching Worldwide
edited by
Rodolfo Jacobson
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 1998
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.
© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Codeswitching worldwide I edited by Rodolfo Jacobson.
p. cm. - (Trends in linguistics. Studies and mono-
graphs ; 106)
Selected rev. papers from two sessions of the XIII World
Congress of Sociology, held 1994 at the University of Biele-
feld, Bielefeld, Germany, with other studies included.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-015151-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Code switching (Linguistics) I. Jacobson, Rodolfo.
II. World Congress of Sociology (13th : 1994 : University of
Bielefeld) III. Series.
PI 15.3.C645 1997
306.44—dc21 97-36866
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Codeswitching worldwide / ed. by Rodolfo Jacobson. - Berlin ;
New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1998
(Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 106)
ISBN 3-11-015151-0
© Copyright 1997 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan-
ical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, with-
out permission in writing from the publisher.
Typesetting and printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin.
Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin.
Printed in Germany.
Contents
Introduction
Rodolfo Jacobson
Section 1
General issues and new frontiers
Codeswitching, codemixing, and code alternation:
What a difference
Hendrik Boeschoten
Codeswitching: An unequal partnership?
Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E. Davies
Conveying a broader message through bilingual discourse:
An attempt at Contrastive Codeswitching research
Rodolfo Jacobson
Section 2
Language norms and models and how to describe them
Taxonomic or functional models in the description of
codeswitching? Evidence from Mandinka and Wolof in African
contact situations
Delia Haust and Norbert Dittmar
Structural uniformities vs. community differences in codeswitching
Carol Myers-Scotton
Meaning and form in code-switching
Shoji Azuma
The relationship between form and function in written national
language-English codeswitching: Evidence from Mexico, Spain
and Bulgaria
Erica McClure
vi Contents
Section 3
Patterns and styles in codeswitching
Banana split? Variations in language choice and code-switching
patterns of two groups of British-born Chinese in Tyneside
Li Wei 153
Variability in code-switching styles: Turkish-German
code-switching patterns
Jeanine Treffers-Daller 177
Section 4
The historical perspective: Genetics and language shift
Is genetic connection relevant in code-switching? Evidence from
South Asian languages
Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande 201
Codeswitching as an indicator for language shift? Evidence from
Sardinian-Italian bilingualism
Rosita Rindler Schjerve 221
Bibliography 249
Index 263
Introduction
Rodolfo Jacobson
Codeswitching worldwide has been designed to capture the latest views in
the field of codeswitching research. This state of the art document aims
at stressing the notion that the alternation of codes in bilingual discourse
is more than a random phenomenon occurring now in one language and
then in the other but is rather a structured mechanism of selection of two
or more languages in the construction of sentences, thus establishing itself
as a subbranch of sociolinguistics in its own right. The core of studies
included in this volume consists of papers that were presented at the XIII
World Congress of Sociology, held in 1994 at the University of Bielefeld
in the city of the same name in Germany. Various papers read at two
codeswitching sessions have been selected for inclusion after they were
extensively revised to meet the standards set for this publication. Other
studies on the same general topic were subsequently elicited to broaden
the scope of research, the result being a volume dealing with the switching
of codes and containing studies by international scholars from seven dif-
ferent countries, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Morocco, Turkey, the
Netherlands, and the United States of America, concerning language situ-
ations in Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. The volume has been subdi-
vided into four major sections, Section 1: General issues and new fron-
tiers, Section 2: Language norms and models and how to describe them,
Section 3: Patterns and styles in codeswitching, and Section 4: The histor-
ical perspective: Genetics and language shift. Two further sections include
a general bibliography (Section 5), and a further section (Section 6) as-
sisting the reader, by means of a well-arranged index, in locating the
terms and topics that appear in the various chapters. The objective of the
present introduction is to highlight some of the issues discussed in the
chapters that follow.
In the first contribution, Hendrik Boeschoten discusses the internal
variation in contact varieties and calls the readers' attention to the fact
that "marginal patterns in one of two contact languages may correspond
to basic patterns in the other and thus facilitate code-switching and inter-
ference in general, leading to the convergence". The point is well taken
and reveals the close relationship there is between mixed discourse and
language change. Rosita Rindler Schjerve has more to say about this in
2 Rodolfo Jacobson
her discussion of Sardinian—Italian codeswitching, an issue that is rarely
pursued by the students of code alternation. Boeschoten provides valu-
able data from Dutch—Turkish and Melaju Sini-Dutch codeswitching
but also includes Pandharipande's well-known data in Marathi-English.
In a section on codeswitching and norms, Boeschoten establishes an in-
teresting relationship between the mixing phenomena found in some Tur-
kish—Dutch data and the language choice common among Belgian and
Swiss bilinguals. This difference is also emphasized in the article by Ben-
tahila-Davies who propose a language alternation mechanism that sets
the latter apart from other language mixing manipulations. For Boescho-
ten, conventionalization is an important part of the shaping of codes-
witching patterns, even though he does not deny the importance of con-
straint rules that have been posited by scores of other scholars.
Whether mixed discourse is a matter of language mixing or of lan-
guage choice is explored more directly by Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys
Davies, two Moroccan researchers who work on switching phenomena
encountered in French-Arabic discourse. These authors roughly follow
Myers-Scotton's notion of a Matrix Language Frame Model, the mecha-
nism by which now portions of French are inserted in Arabic discourse
and then portions of Arabic are inserted in French discourse. They char-
acterize this kind of switching as one of unequal partnership, since one
language is playing a dominant and the other a subordinate role. Bentah-
ila and Davies recognize that this unequal partnership switching is the
one most frequently encountered and that it is described by codeswitch-
ing scholars regardless of which language pairs are studied. The major
thrust of the chapter, however, is to propose a third kind of mechanism
in which speakers now choose one language and then the other without
assigning dominant status to either one. A lengthy citation of French-
Arabic discourse (cf. Bentahila-Davies example (13)) serves them to
identify what they call "language alternation", that is, an instance of
language choice that reveals no dominance of one language over the
other but rather a situation in which both languages carry equal responsi-
bility in the unfolding of the story. The word count as well as the analysis
at clause level are said to show that French and Moroccan Arabic both
hold their own and the alternation between clauses now in one language
and then in the other lends further credit to the fact that this switching
strategy is indeed quite different from those discussed in the earlier part
of the article. In assigning the mechanism of "language alternation" to a
piece of discourse does not rule out that insertions or leaks may also be
present but, seen in a broader perspective, it qualifies as displaying a
Introduction 3
switching process that differs from the earlier two. Not every bilingual
speaker may feel qualified in engaging in this kind of balanced code al-
ternation as it requires a superior competency in the two languages, but
"true" bilinguals using whichever language pair they may be at ease with
may opt for alternation or choice and not for embedding, inserting, or
letting one minor language item of the guest language leak into the host
language.
The literature of the eighties and early nineties has abounded with
suggestions or even assertions to the extent that certain findings concern-
ing codeswitching were not to be taken as language-specific but were
universally valid. As a matter of fact, Shana Poplack had proposed two
constraints, the Bound Morpheme Constraint and the Equivalence Con-
straint, which according to her and her associates did not only apply to
the languages that she had studied in the United States and Canada but
also crosslinguistically to all languages. The disbelief that this statement
was causing triggered the identification of scores of counterexamples,
particularly from non-Indo-European languages, that would invalidate
the universality of these constraints. Even though Myers-Scotton's work
eventually succeeded in overcoming the impasse, even she, based on her
East-African language data, did not fully abandon the notion of univer-
sality (but see Treffers-Daller's contribution). Rodolfo Jacobson gives a
historical survey of these constraints, the counterexamples, the impasse,
and the subsequent formulation of Myers-Scotton's models. His main
emphasis in his contribution, however, lies in his questioning the appro-
priateness of universal statements of this kind, and he recommends
greater modesty in expanding the applicability of findings relative to one
or two language pairs to situations outside the range of languages
studied. He argues in effect that one does not yet have enough informa-
tion on all language settings where codeswitching occurs to make sweep-
ing statements in terms of what is universally valid. Jacobson provides
data from the Mexican-American setting in the United States and from
Malaysia showing how Spanish-English and Malay-English are
switched in these communities and argues that all that can presently be
abstracted from those crosslinguistically is a message of broadest dimen-
sions concerning the speakers' general intent but not a manifestation of
the universality of specific constraints. He thus acknowledges for the
Mexican-American context a message of ethnic identification and com-
pares this message to that of many bilingual Malaysians who, by means
of a dual objective, fuse as well as contrast the two languages to express,
on one hand, their intellectual pride of being speakers of both languages