Holmes Code Switching

12 Key excerpts on "Holmes Code Switching"

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  Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Multilingualism

  The Fundamentals

  • Simona Montanari, Suzanne Quay, Simona Montanari, Suzanne Quay(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  7.2 Definitions and theories 7.2.1 Codeswitching as a language contact phenomenon Codeswitching is defined as a communication strategy typically used by multilin-guals, in which they alternate between languages, in the context of a single con-versation. An altered speech item is called a switch , and it may occur within an utterance ( intrasentential switching), or at the end of one and the beginning of the next utterance ( intersentential switching) (Poplack 1980). The former is also called classic (Myers-Scotton 1993) or alternational codeswitching (Muysken 2000). Other language contact terms include codemixing, borrowing, or alternation. Not all researchers use the same terms; in particular, codeswitching, borrow-ing and code mixing are used interchangeably. Borrowing occurs when a word or short expression in one language is inserted in another while maintaining the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the original language. Codeswitching also occurs when fluent speakers switch languages between or within sentences but preserve the phonological and other grammatical properties of each language. Similarly, codemixing refers to the transfer of linguistic elements from one lan-guage to another, without conforming to the phonetic or morphological conven-tions of the alternate language, with the code modification occurring in the same sentence (intrasententially). Today, researchers tend to use both codeswitching and codemixing interchangeably as they stress the functional aspect of the phe-nomenon and consider the “ switching ” as evidence of a verbal skill requiring greater competence in all language repertoires (Stavans and Hoffmann 2015). The term codeswitching was coined by Haugen (1956), who distinguished between switching, codeswitching, and integration. Here, “ switching ” was used 124 Anat Stavans and Ronit Porat

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  Codeswitching

  Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives

  • Monica Heller(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Introduction Monica Heller The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Codeswitching, the use of more than one language in the course of a single communicative episode, has attracted a great deal of attention over the years, most likely because it violates a strong expectation that only one language will be used at any given time. It is seen as something to be explained, whereas the use of one language is considered normal. This notion can be so powerful that even those who codeswitch can be unaware of their behaviour and vigorously deny doing anything of the kind. The perspective taken in this volume is that codeswitching con-stitutes one of many forms of language contact phenomena, and can best be understood by placing it in the double context of the speech economy of a multilingual community and of the verbal repertoires of individual members of that community. In order to understand the social significance of codeswitching, and in order to understand why it takes the particular linguistic and discourse forms that it does at specific historical moments in specific com-munities, it is necessary to place it in the context of other forms of language contact phenomena occurring in the community, including the absence of any such phenomena. The approach taken here is essentially functionalist: code-switching is seen as a boundary-levelling or boundary-maintaining strategy, which contributes, as a result, to the definition of roles and role relationships at a number of levels, to the extent that interlocutors bear multiple role relationships to each other. It is an important part of social mechanisms of negotiation and definition of social roles, networks and boundaries. At the same time, it is effective only where interlocutors share an understanding of the significance of the pool of communicative resources from which codeswitching is drawn. Conventions must be shared in order for their violation to have meaning.

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  Bilingualism in Schools and Society

  Language, Identity, and Policy, Second Edition

  • Sarah J. Shin(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This would sometimes entail the use of features that are perceived by some speakers as unusual, such as “pizza mo two minutes coming”. Researchers argue that this type of language mixing does not have any local meaning, as traditional code-switching studies have tried to show. In this type of spontaneous, frequent, high-density language contact, it is not possible to predict whether someone will code-switch at any given point or whether two people with similar code-switching habits will both code-switch on the same occasion (Auer, 1999; He, 2013; Li, 2011). There is no discernible cognitive, contextual, and conversational-sequential motivation behind the switches. In other words, code-switching takes place for no apparent reason. Agnes He’s (2013) data from Chinese heritage language speakers show that the switches are: 1) not guided by any external principle or source, 2) unplanned, evolving as the interaction unfolds, and 3) always different and unpredictable. She observes that the switches are “a collage and calibration of holistic resources (phonemic, morpho-phonemic, syntactic, prosodic, episodic, sequential) from the entire linguistic repertoire simultaneously accessible to Chinese heritage language speakers, resulting in innovative and invigorating multi-performances that are based on their multi-competence” (He, 2013: 314). Overall, the recent rise of new terms celebrating multilingual performance is a welcome development given that bilingual students have too long been penalized for what they cannot do, rather than praised for what they can do. Terms like “translanguaging” and “flexible bilingualism” help educators see the importance of drawing from multiple languages and modalities in the classroom and encourage teachers to take a holistic approach that takes into account all of the languages in the learner’s linguistic repertoire

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  Code-Switching in Conversation

  Language, Interaction and Identity

  • Peter Auer(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I The ‘Codes' of Code-Switching

  Passage contains an image

  From ‘Switching Code' to ‘Code-Switching' Towards a reconceptualisation of communicative codes

  Celso Alvarez-Cáccamo DOI: 10.4324/9780203017883-2

  Introduction to Chapter 2

  AuerPeter

  Although loosely based on Celso Alvarez-Cáccamo’s empirical research on language use and linguistic ideologies in Galiza, Spain, the chapter which introduces the first part of this volume first and foremost has a theoretical and historiographical orientation. Alvarez takes us back to the beginnings of the use of the term ‘code-switching in linguistics’, which means to the early 1950s. We learn that in studies in bilingualism, it was not E.Haugen who used the term for the first time (as is often believed), but rather Hans Vogt in an article from 1954. More important for the term’s success in linguistics was probably Roman Jakobson, who as early as 1952 drew parallels between language switching, co-existent phonological systems in borrowing, and information theory, where the term was already established usage. (The information theoretical connotation of the compound ‘code-switching’ is of course easily traceable even today, but many researchers take the term for granted without knowing its origins, or at least without wanting them to be part of its meaning; hence the widespread use of the non-hyphenated form in recent publications.)

  Alvarez advocates a return to the Jakobsonian notion of ‘switching codes’. The important aspect in Jakobson’s early borrowing of the term from information theory is that, in this usage, it does not refer to a switching of languages in speech, but rather to the cognitive codes humans or machines must have stored

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  Code-Switching in Early English

  • Herbert Schendl, Laura Wright, Herbert Schendl, Laura Wright(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Following the definition adopted in Section 4.1., code-switching presupposes the existence of two or more different, but discrete (and distinguishable) languages. In many medi-eval mixed-language texts (including a number discussed in this volume), this seems to be uncontroversial, such as the Old English mixed-language leases (Schendl, this volume), while in other cases it is less evident (see Trotter, this volume; Wright, this volume). In these latter cases it might be justifiable to ask whether such medieval texts represent a new type of code. The discussion is partly linked to the definition of the term “code”, which originally comes from communication technology, where it had a very specific meaning, but is now widely used in certain fields of linguistics “as a neutral umbrella term for languages, dialects, styles/registers, etc. and partly usurps the place of the more usual ‘catch-all’ term variety to cover the different sub-division of ‘language’ ” (Gardner-Chloros 2009: 11). In his edition and analysis of a corpus of late-medieval macaronic sermons, which show a high incidence Code-switching in early English 31 of – apparently random – intrasentential switches from Latin into English, Wenzel (1994) raised the question of whether such sermons represented “an attempt to create a mixed language made for special bilingual audiences [. . .] suited for delivery from the pulpit” (1994: 127), comparing it to the “aureate diction [. . .] used by some contemporary poets”. He rejected this interpreta-tion, as he found no linguistic features or patterns to support such a hypothesis and the two languages, Latin and English, appear as discrete and distinguish-able entities. The analysis of sermons from the same manuscript by Halmari and Regetz (this volume) confirms that such sermons can be satisfactorily analysed as intrasentential code-switching. The question is, however, more relevant for the large number of medi-eval civic, administrative and commercial texts.

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  Introducing Language and Society

  • Rodney H. Jones, Christiana Themistocleous(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Even the acknowledgement that such hybridity exists and that it is something worth studying is a fairly new development. Until the 1970s most linguists regarded this phenomenon as language ‘interference’ – one language interfering with a person’s ability to express themselves in 5.1 Introduction 103 another language – and took it as evidence of some kind of deficit or impediment on the part of speakers. People who mixed different codes were often labelled ‘lazy’, ‘uneducated’, or ‘confused’, unable to form ‘correct’ sentences or utterances in a given ‘language’. Carol Myers-Scotton (1993: 48), one of the most prominent scholars of code switching/mixing, reports: [E]ven though I was doing fieldwork intermittently from 1964–1973 on language use in African multilingual communities, I never recognised [code switching] as a special phenomenon until 1972 . . . Even when I myself observed language in use, as I often did, I managed to ‘ignore’ code switching. This early reluctance to even recognise code switching/mixing as a legit- imate communicative practice itself shows how powerful the influence of the ideology of linguistic purism has been, even among linguists. Eventually, however, sociolinguists started to acknowledge that this kind of linguistic hybridity was not only common but also purposeful, and began to turn their attention to trying to understand why people did it. As we said in Chapter 2, whenever people choose particular resources from their communicative repertoires, they do so for a pur- pose – in order to make some kind of special meaning, to show themselves to be particular kinds of people, to manage their relationships, or to advance some kind of view of the world. Below we will describe some of the frameworks sociolinguists have developed over the years to under- stand how people use code mixing to achieve these different purposes.

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  Codeswitching Worldwide. II

  • Rodolfo Jacobson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Long perceived as intrusive and detrimental to developing communicative competence in the foreign language. In fact, teachers who become aware that they alternate codes feel ill at ease and guilty about it, as this is not considered good practice. These switches, in turn, have generated a considerable amount of research recently as borne out by the International Conference on Codeswitching held in St. Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris in France, in February 1997, gathering scholars from several countries. Of the four specialized language journals 1 of proceedings published on this occasion, one in particular deals exclusively with codeswitching in the classroom (Castellotti and Moore 1997) as it contributes to the process of learning, offering a frank reversal of perspective on the role of codeswitching in foreign language teaching and learning. The foreign language classroom 313 2. Research methodology 2.1. A review of the literature: From quantitative studies to an ethnographic approach In an excellent critical review of the literature on codeswitching in the classroom, Marilyn Martin-Jones (1990 and 1995) traces the surge of interest in this field back to the mid 1970's and 1980's when educational interest was stimulated in the United States by the educational needs of the linguistic minority children including Spanish speakers of Cuban, Mexican and Puerto Rican origin who had to master English. Investigation of codeswitching in bilingual and multilingual classrooms such as these aimed at showing educational outcomes of linguistic distribution to fuel educational debate. These studies were largely of a quantitative nature in response to questions about the place occupied respectively by each of the languages present, its use for speech acts and its relevance to the management of interaction. During a second phase, research focused on what teachers do with language revealing the nature of discourse functions associated with the choice of code.

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  Language and Man

  Anthropological Issues

  • William C. McCormack, Stephen A. Wurm, William C. McCormack, Stephen A. Wurm(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Here we shall focus on code switching. Though some of the switches were marked by a pause, as a rule they occurred on sentence level without markers. (The text somehow mirrors his leaps of thought.) All Swedish sentences refer to activities Sven had noticed and experienced in the Swedish family during the day, such as letter writing and being read to from a book. The last switch into Estonian is due to the trigger word Liisu, the name of his Estonian cousin. Also in this monologue, place and person seem to be the most important variables among the conditioning factors of code switching. CONCLUSION The structure and motivation of code switching I have analyzed seem to justify the following model of the developing competence of the child (Figure 1). When the two languages he is hearing are Li and L2, his repertoire is L3. L3 contains elements and rules from Li and L2 as well as elements and rules typical only for Ls. They were activated according to the requirements of the situation. In certain speech events Li parts are dominant, in others those from L2, and in still others the autonomous parts of Ls. The contact of languages gives the child an opportunity to choose the linguistic medium of expression. It gives the child also the chance to create what is most appropriate for him to master in his speech acts. 198 ELS OKSAAR L t U with its variants with its variants Figure 1. The developing competence of the bilingual child Characterizing the first stage as mixed, this point will be missed. It is more precise to speak of an overall code. The emerging grammars of unilingual children include rules and elements that do not exist in the adult's code. The repertoire of children learning more than one language simultaneously also contains rules and elements that cannot be found in either one of them.

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  Multilingual Perspectives on Translanguaging

  • Jeff MacSwan(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  As the last piece of evidence against the unitary view of translanguaging, consider the results of Myslín and Levy (2015), who argue that sociopragmatic, psycholinguistic and discourse-informational factors are the primary drivers of codeswitching. Using mixed-effects logistic regression to analyze spontaneous Czech-English conversations, they observe that Czech and English encode different information content: Czech encodes low information-content material whereas English encodes high information-content material. The key explanatory factor in their study was that bilingual speakers codeswitch words and expressions that carry a high amount of information in discourse: That codeswitching is a formal marker of information content, with switches (from Czech) to the less frequent – and thus more salient – language (English) serving as a cue to less predictable meanings that comprehenders must attend. In a translanguaging framework of assumptions, where mental grammars are conceived of as a unitary linguistic system of large and complex arrays of disaggregated structural features that do not belong to two different languages, Czech-English bilingual language use does not receive an account – unless, as we suggested above, one ‘assembly of features’ in the mental grammar/idiolect is discourse-informationally coded differently from another ‘assembly’; which, however, makes their proposal similar to the dual-linguistic models of codeswitching they critique.

  We close this section discussing Li’s (2018) latest revision of translanguaging theory. He clarifies his position on translanguaging, stating that: (i) ‘in everyday social interaction, language users move dynamically between the so-called languages, language varieties, styles, registers, and writing systems, to fulfill a variety of strategic and communicative functions. The alternation between languages, spoken, written or signed; between language varieties; and between speech, writing, and signing is a very common feature of human interaction’ (Li, 2018: 26, italics added); and (ii) ‘For me, Translanguaging has never intended to replace code-switching or any other term, although it challenges the code view of languages’ (2018: 27). The first quote betrays the familiar language-identification paradox among translanguaging scholars, noted by Seargeant and Tagg (2011) and discussed above. The second quote, with the attendant presuppositions, concedes that codeswitching is not replaceable by translanguaging. However, Li maintains that the term translanguaging does challenge the code view of language. We believe this position stems from what we call the representational fallacy: that a bilingual speaker’s repertoire contains a ‘single array of disaggregated features’ (García & Li, 2014: 15; cf. also Otheguy et al

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  Code-switching Between Structural and Sociolinguistic Perspectives

  • Gerald Stell, Kofi Yakpo, Gerald Stell, Kofi Yakpo(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Code-switching between cognition and socio-pragmatics dp n="26" folio="18" ? dp n="27" folio="19" ? Passage contains an image Ad Backus, Tilburg University

  A usage-based approach to code-switching: The need for reconciling structure and function

  Abstract: This chapter argues that the field of code-switching studies could be reinvigorated by the introduction of a usage-based approach. The perspective this approach brings to the study of linguistic competence allows a fresh look at the debate about how to distinguish between code-switching and borrowing, and also stimulates further unification of contact linguistics. Specifically, it calls for a unified account of code-switching, loan translation and structural borrowing. The outlines of such a unified model are sketched. Its chief feature is that all contact effects are seen as aspects of a general process of language change, some emphasizing a synchronic perspective and others a diachronic one. Both perspectives, however, are indispensable for a general account of change, itself a basic design feature of language. It is argued, finally, that adopting a usage-based approach also entails adopting new methodologies into contact research.

  1 Introduction: Code-switching and its explanation

  For many linguists, the goal of linguistics is to describe the mental representation of linguistic knowledge in the minds of individual speakers. While there is nothing wrong with that at all, I wish to draw attention to what I see as two problems with the way linguistic theorizing is generally conducted, and the specific shape they take in the code-switching literature. First, the concept of “knowledge” is often understood in a needlessly limited way, excluding knowledge about language use and practice, about the social life of language, and about its functions. I will argue that a broader concept of knowledge is not just more ecologically valid, but also allows asking questions which now rarely rise to the surface, or only do so in separate fields that don’t communicate much with each other. Second, the concept of “language” with which linguistics operates is relatively unclear. While linguistic knowledge resides in the individual speaker, we normally conceptualize language at higher levels of aggregation: what we generally describe is not really the knowledge of the individual speaker but the knowledge of clusters of speakers (e.g. the speakers of a particular dialect or language). Both problems are tackled by the currently ascendant usage-based approach in linguistics, and I will argue that adopting this approach in code-switching research can give the field a much-needed boost.

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  Cognitive Processing in Bilinguals

  • R.J. Harris(Author)
  • 1992(Publication Date)
  • North Holland

    (Publisher)

  In I-M. Liu, H-C. Chen, & M. J. Chen (Eds.), Cognitive aspects of the Cliiriese language, Vul. I . Hong Kong: Asian Research Service, pp. 119-139. 442 W.L. Lee et a1 Tzeng, 0. J. L., & Hung, D. L. (in press). Location-specific inhibition in visual selective attention. Psychological Science. Tzeng, 0. J. L., & Wang, W. S-Y. (1983). The first two R’s. American Scienfbf, 71, 238-243. Cognitive Processing in Bilinguals - R.J. llarris (Editor) 0 1992 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved. 44 3 Code-switching and Language Dominance Abdelali Bentahila and Eirlys E. Davies Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University Abstract Whereas recent research on code-switching has focussed largely on the search for syntactic constraints, this paper argues that more attention should be paid to the influence of social and psychological variables on switching patterns. A comparison of the discourse of two types of Moroccan bilingual reveals striking differences in the types of switch used. An attempt is made to relate the patterns favoured by each group to aspects of their language background, in particular to the contrast between balanced bilinguals and those dominant in one language. The phenomenon of code-switching (which we may define informally here as the use by a bilingual of more than one language within a single utterance or exchange, as opposed to the choice of different languages in different contexts) has attracted a great deal of attention in the past twenty years, and there is now a considerable body of literature reporting on switching in a wide variety of communities, involving many different pairs of languages. The issue that has received most attention is the search for structural constraints which can account for the ways in which the two languages can be combined.

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  The Multilingualism of Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687)

  • Christopher Joby(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  45 A related motivation for code switching is that another language of fers a more succinct word or phrase than the core language of a text. Later in his letter to Hooke, Huygens writes: ‘I know your noble witt and industrie can never otiari. ’ It may simply be that Huygens wants to switch into Latin, having set the pattern for this by including Latin terms earlier in the letter. Or it may be that otiari in some sense ‘fits the bill’ better than an English 44 KB, MS KA 48 nos. 7 and 8. 45 One other way to consider the case of valvula and series would be to place them on a dia-chronic continuum, whereby a loan-word is initially incorporated into another language by code switching, but over time gradually establishes itself as a loan-word. Cf. Gardner-Chloros (12). For more on the incorporation of Latin words into vernacular languages, see Burke (2004: 133). 250 THE MULTILINGUALISM OF CONSTANTIJN HUYGENS (1596-1687) term. It is more succinct than ‘to take a holiday’, the core meaning of otiari , although ‘relax’ or ‘tire’ would probably be closer to what Huygens had in mind. Finally, Huygens probably also knew that Hooke could read Latin and so included a Latin word other than a technical term to reflect their shared learning. Code Switching Inspired by ‘Macaronics’ Huygens also engaged in forms of code switching that have at their heart macaronics. Originally this term was applied to text, which included at least some Latin, and the juxtaposition of Latin and words from vernacular languages in macaronics can be seen as part of the rise of the modern vernacular in the late medieval and early modern period (see Chapter 1). Over time, though, the term has become applicable to ‘code switching’ between languages in general. In the introduction to this chapter a defin i-tion of macaronics was given as ‘any literary construction that is written in more than one language’ (Stewart: 165).

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