Codeswitching Worldwide: [I] 9783110812190, 9783110151510

Table of contents :
Introduction
Section 1. General issues and new frontiers
Codeswitching, codemixing, and code alternation: What a difference
Codeswitching: An unequal partnership?
Conveying a broader message through bilingual discourse: An attempt at Contrastive Codeswitching research
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
Structural uniformities vs. community differences in codeswitching
Meaning and form in code-switching
The relationship between form and function in written national language – English codeswitching: Evidence from Mexico, Spain and Bulgaria
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
Variability in code-switching styles: Turkish – German code-switching patterns
Section 4. The historical perspective: Genetics and language shift
Is genetic connection relevant in code-switching? Evidence from South Asian languages
Codeswitching as an indicator for language shift? Evidence from Sardinian – Italian bilingualism
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Codeswitching Worldwide

W DE G

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

M o u t o n de Gruyter (formerly M o u t o n , The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the A N S I to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

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Codeswitching worldwide I edited by R o d o l f o Jacobson. p. cm. - (Trends in linguistics. Studies and m o n o graphs ; 106) Selected rev. papers from two sessions of the XIII World Congress of Sociology, held 1994 at the University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, with other studies included. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-015151-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. C o d e 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 : M o u t o n de Gruyter, 1998 (Trends in linguistics : Studies and m o n o g r a p h s ; 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. N o part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting and printing: Arthur Collignon G m b H , 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 different countries, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Morocco, Turkey, the Netherlands, and the United States of America, concerning language situations in Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. The volume has been subdivided into four major sections, Section 1: General issues and new frontiers, Section 2: Language norms and models and how to describe them, Section 3: Patterns and styles in codeswitching, and Section 4: The historical perspective: Genetics and language shift. Two further sections include a general bibliography (Section 5), and a further section (Section 6) assisting 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 interference 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

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Rodolfo Jacobson

her discussion of Sardinian—Italian codeswitching, an issue that is rarely pursued by the students of code alternation. Boeschoten provides valuable 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 interesting relationship between the mixing phenomena found in some Turkish—Dutch data and the language choice common among Belgian and Swiss bilinguals. This difference is also emphasized in the article by Bentahila-Davies who propose a language alternation mechanism that sets the latter apart from other language mixing manipulations. For Boeschoten, conventionalization is an important part of the shaping of codeswitching patterns, even though he does not deny the importance of constraint rules that have been posited by scores of other scholars. Whether mixed discourse is a matter of language mixing or of language 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 mechanism by which now portions of French are inserted in Arabic discourse and then portions of Arabic are inserted in French discourse. They characterize this kind of switching as one of unequal partnership, since one language is playing a dominant and the other a subordinate role. Bentahila and Davies recognize that this unequal partnership switching is the one most frequently encountered and that it is described by codeswitching 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 FrenchArabic 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 responsibility 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 alternation 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 concerning 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 Constraint, 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 universality (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 appropriateness 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 information on all language settings where codeswitching occurs to make sweeping 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 dimensions 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 compares 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

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Jacobson

and, on the other, keep them apart in defense of their own linguistic identity. It appears that Jacobson's arguments are a needed caveat not to exceed in the crosslinguistic predictions that were so commonplace in earlier studies. The jointly authored paper by Delia Haust and Norbert Dittmar is the first contribution of the second major section of the book and bears the title of "Taxonomic and functional models in the description of codeswitching". Haust, who is the principal researcher of the study, draws on the data that are part of her doctoral project on Mandinka Wolof codeswitching, mixed language samples gathered in the Gambia in 1992. The sociolinguistic setting describes a language situation that is not readily familiar to most researchers and thus reveals a multilingual situation of unusual interest. The descriptive model to categorize codeswitching leans heavily on the Matrix Language Frame model developed by Myers-Scotton, even though some specific elaborations on the nature of morphemes found in the data seem to have emerged from the very data under consideration. Haust notes the "overwhelmingly high proportions of English insertions while English is hardly ever found as matrix language of a sentence". In the later part of the article, the authors provide a valuable lengthy citation of one male speaker from a Mandinka dominated area in which the speaker alternates between Mandinka, Wolof, and English, thus offering an interesting picture of trilingual switching. It is stressed in the conclusion that one here witnesses the creative potential of verbal skills and communicative competence in the sense that "codeswitching adds to the social polyphony of multilingual communication to monolingual conversation". The richness of the data makes this contribution most readable, even though the full analysis contained in Haust's dissertation is not rendered in its entirety because of limitation in space. The frequent reference to Myers-Scotton and the Matrix Language Frame Model proposed by her makes one reflect how to go about determining which language in a given bilingual discourse should be assigned dominant status, that is to say, which chunk or chunks must be considered matrix and which embedded language. The following contribution by Carol Myers-Scotton devotes a large portion of the study entitled "Structural uniformities vs. community differences in codeswitching" to that very issue. According to her, four theoretical constructs or premises structure the model, and the reader will find in her discussion ample clarification of these constructs. Many of the notions that she puts forth are familiar to most readers from her earlier studies. New may however

Introduction

5

be the concept of intra-complement phrase codeswitching that leads her to refute the notion of intrasentential codeswitching and replace it by that of a clause with a complementer node because, according to her, the complement phrase can be defined more precisely than any previously used construct. An example from Swahili-English helps capture various types of constituents in English complement phrases that can be found in a Swahili matrix language. Her predilection for theoretical discussions shows up again in the present study that they do help the reader understand more clearly how the model proposed by her actually works. On the other hand, the writer does not limit herself to only theoretical debates of linguistic constructs but considers a second set of criteria having sociolinguistic basis. This leads her to explore, also in this article, the notion of markedness and to refer to "unmarked" choice as the usual kind of switching within complement phrases. In other words, linguistic as well as sociolinguistic criteria come together in the attempt to identify the matrix language. Within the terms of the hypotheses derived from her model, she argues that "all codeswitching, no matter how diverse the language pairs, shows the same structural coherence". This argument continues to show her commitment to the concept of universality for which the earlier research in the eighties had been so well-known. A number of interesting sociolinguistic issues are taken up in greater detail in her section on the Sociology of codeswitching. This is where she comes to grips with the relationship between dominance and codeswitching, returns to the notion of "unmarked codeswitching", and finally examines several community-specific patterns of codeswitching. It is in the discussions of this subtopic that she approaches more closely several concerns of other codeswitching scholars like Bentahila-Davies, Treffers-Daller, and, to some extent, also Jacobson. Toward the end of the contribution, Myers-Scotton, in comments on Backus' work, touches upon the relationship between codeswitching and language change, an issue that Rindler Schjerve scrutinizes so well, since that issue represents the main thrust of her study. Myers-Scotton's theoretical discussions of the Matrix Language Frame Model and her incursions into the sociolinguistics of codeswitching, in turn, provide the reader with answers to questions on many crucial issues. In another contribution, Shoji Azuma explores, on a somewhat less abstract plane, the speech processing into which the bilingual engages when he/she has opted to switch between languages. Azuma's main point in his article "Meaning and form in codeswitching" examines Levelt's view concerning speech processing to the effect that it does not proceed

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Rodolfo Jacobson

word-by-word but rather chunk-by-chunk, and finds an analogous situation in codeswitched utterances like the one in French-Tunisian Arabic discourse cited by Belazi et al. In his experiment with Japanese-English bilinguals, Azuma finds a similar speech production to the effect that switching does not begin as long as the chunk in the initial language has not been successfully completed. He argues that the preservation of a chunk in one language is a way to maintain discourse coherence and meaningfulness. Azuma obviously realizes that the term "chunk" needs further clarification to become a valid element in switching analysis and justifies "chunkness" in terms of the "stand-alone principle". Examples from four language pairs allow him to show a series of discourse markers that can stand alone and are therefore appropriate candidates for code switches. Other than discourse markers, there may also be certain elements of number, time and space, phrasal units, and open-class items that can stand alone, meaning that these can all be codeswitched without contributing to loss of coherence. It is the switchability of open-class items that induces Azuma to consider the correlation "word class" and the "stand-alone principle". A number of examples from different language-pair situations seem to suggest at first that, whereas open class items can be switched freely, closed-class items cannot. However, Azuma eventually identifies several instances of closed-class switches that attest to the fact that the semantic load of some closed-class items is powerful enough to let them stand alone, that is, to appear as switches to the other language. Studies of codeswitching are normally based on oral performance and yield a wealth of information on how two or more languages enter a sentence frame by having them function as matrix languages, embedded languages, or as "dual" language chunks in the sense of Bentahila—Davies' proposed "Language Alternation". Such instances of codeswitching illustrate "intrasentential" - or, if you will, intra-complement phrasal, according to Myers-Scotton - switching patterns. However, occasionally, oral codeswitching performance occurs while moving from one to the other sentence. Bilingual discourse of this kind is known as "intersentential codeswitching". Studies of codeswitching based on written performance, in turn, are rare and seem to require that a language that is not native to the writer be embedded in the sentence of the native language of the country, meaning that intrasentential conversational codeswitching can hardly occur in any of the written samples. Erica McClure provides the reader with an exhaustive study of written codeswitching that she examined in the publications and media of Mexico, Spain, and Bulgaria.

Introduction

7

The article entitled "The relationship between form and function in written national language—English codeswitching: Evidence from Mexico, Spain and Bulgaria" describes, in its introduction, the overall framework of an analysis that is deeply rooted in the studies of Gal whose work on ethnic language behavior in the Hungarian setting is well-known to the experienced reader. Her introduction ends with the identification of her own written sources, mainly from sociopolitical and literary magazines but also from a variety of commercial signs observed in the Bulgarian capital. The designation of "codeswitch" as opposed to "borrowing" in her data is, according to her own admission, more tenuous in the written format and the typographic conventions like quotation marks, underlining, italics and so forth are hardly clear guides in naming a correct identification. As a result, McClure sets forth her own conventions how to distinguish one from the other. One of the major sections of her study traces, in the Spanish language press (Mexico, Spain), the factors which contribute to the insertion of English language items into the Spanish context. Some of these factors are lack of a good Spanish translation, lack of a set Spanish word or phrase, greater explicitness of the English form, play with well-known English phrases, emphasis through repetition, and a few others. The richness of data is quite impressive and the joint listing of Mexican and Spanish examples allows the reader to gain insight into the different roles that English plays in the two countries. In the section on Bulgarian—English codeswitching, McClure shows quite effectively that the broad range of functions found in the Hispanic data is reduced to merely a few functions, such as, exact names and titles of Western products, the reproduction of lyrics of rock songs, specialized terms referring to the field of cosmetics and so forth. McClure notes that "it is in commercial use that English occurs most frequently in Bulgaria". In a section dealing with the factors that influence patterns of codeswitching in the three countries, McClure moves from the collection and explication of data into the kind of sociolinguistic analysis that emphasizes the roles of the communities involved in her study and assesses the status of English there ranging from a reasonably close association due to geographic proximity with the United States (Mexico) to a looser assocation with a country where English, although important, is not the only foreign language studied (Spain) and on to a still looser association with a country where English has gained importance only through the import of goods of various kinds (Bulgaria), although, in regard to the latter, she notes a positive development toward a greater role of English in the years to come.

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Rodolfo Jacobson

These last four contributions subsumed under the section title "Language norms and models and how to describe them" have explored the kind of models that are appropriate to interpret difficult codeswitching data and examined the interrelationship between the structural characteristics of codeswitching vis-ä-vis the communities in which language mixing occurs. The question of what can be codeswitched has been raised and the stand-alone principle has emerged as a viable criterion in the analysis. Finally, the restriction of codeswitching to oral performance alone has been challenged and been extended to the written mode. In what follows, specific patterns and styles are examined, first among British-born Chinese in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Great Britain, and then among Turkish—German bilinguals in Germany and Turkey. Li Wei presents what he calls "a first attempt at a comparative analysis, using data collected from the Tyneside Chinese community in the Northeast of England". Li Wei distinguishes three different levels of codeswitching in the turn-by-turn organization of a conversation and gives examples of each such level, so that he may explain what variations can be found between them. Two sections are then devoted to the Chinese communities, first in Britain as a whole and then in Tyneside. He focuses in his study on two Cantonese-speaking Chinese families and then examines the language choice and codeswitching patterns of the two groups. Either group of speakers is characterized in terms of specific language choice and codeswitching patterns and, in light of these particular patterns, Wi Lei goes on to suggest an analysis that is illustrated convincingly with a series of turn-by-turn conversations. The difference in the language patterns of the two groups cannot be explained, according to Li Wei, in terms of the difference between the Chinese and English languages or differences in data-collection methods but must be attributed to the history of language contact and social organization of these groups. This conclusion leads Li Wei to focus in his last section on a social-network model of language choice and codeswitching in which he identifies five different types of speakers that make up this particular community. The focus on the speaker and not only on that which is spoken is a welcome approach and lends codeswitching research the empirical flavor that a few other studies still lack. Jeanine Treffers-Daller goes beyond the mere analysis of TurkishGerman data in that she tackles a number of crucial theoretical issues. On one hand she seeks to test several assumptions of Grosjean's Model of Bilingual Speech Processing, and on the other she attempts to show

Introduction

9

the relevance of the distinction between alternation and insertion proposed by Muysken in order to reveal the variability found in codeswitching patterns. Treffers-Daller's major contribution is to alert the reader that the study of constraints proposed by Poplack should no longer be the major focus of codeswitching research and that one should instead consider variability as the primary objective. Two examples from her Turkish—German data illustrate how alternation and insertion are indeed instances of a variable processing of bilingual speech data. Grosjean's model is then elaborated on and lengthy quotes from his work show the extent to which his perception of the bilingual's language processing varies from earlier views. Terms like "base language", "deactivation", and "static/dynamic interferences" are cited, and these new notions suggesting variability seem to supersede those of universal constraints that had abounded in the literature of the eighties. Treffers-Daller's research questions are framed in this light and the assumption that there is a base language in all conversations is becoming a crucial issue. To test this as well as other basic assumptions of Grosjean's model, Treffers-Daller examines "three fragments of 150 utterances each, in which the same speaker speaks to different interlocutors, and with whom this speaker is expected to use different base languages and to travel along the continuum of monolingual and bilingual modes". In the section entitled "The language mode and codeswitching", she then lists a number of suggestions that she hopes to verify in her later analysis. Some of these suggestions concern the location of switches, the question as to whether alternations occur more often in the bilingual or the monolingual mode and also whether the direction of the switches can be predicted in any meaningful way. Treffers-Daller describes her corpus on the basis of the mentioned three fragments, one being characterized as the monolingual German mode, the other as the bilingual German mode, and the last as the bilingual Turkish mode. The summary following the discussion of her analysis is concise and allows the reader to recognize the difference that exists between the various fragments. The conclusion confirms the earlier suggestions in the sense that there is indeed a base language in the speech of the informants in all situations. The codeswitches found in the data do reveal different processing options and, as a whole, the language modes approach is found to be a rewarding approach to identify variability in codeswitching. Both contributions in the present section have shown that codeswitching is not a uniform process but rather one in which different patterns and styles coexist to render the communication varied and at the same time resourceful.

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Jacobson

The last section of the present volume explores the historical perspective of codeswitching. This can be achieved in two ways. One may look to the past in order to trace the genetic relationship and identify differential patterns in light of genetic convergence/divergence. Or one may look to the future and explore the extent to which codeswitching has brought, or is bringing about, language shift. The former is the approach of Rajeshwari Pandharipande, the latter that of Rosita Rindler Schjerve. After a brief introductory discussion in which Pandharipande refers to the limitation of the earlier approaches pursuing universal validity, she argues that what has been missing in previous studies is "the recognition that the most crucial feature of codeswitching is that the process of unmarked as well as intentional codeswitching is motivated by its sociolinguistic function". She alleges that in borrowing from English, the Indian language Marathi also borrows from it the social function of modernity and prestige. She then formulates a universal constraint to the effect that the conformity of the guest structure with the host structure will disallow any degree of separateness of the guest code from the host code. That having been said, Pandharipande moves on to consider the genetic relationship between two language pairs, Marathi-Sanskrit and Marathi— English, and notes that the genetically closer languages (cf. Marathi— Sanskrit) vary in their codeswitching processing from the genetically more distant ones (cf. Marathi—English). The following discussion of Marathi structures are intended to help "demarcate the native or nativized Marathi structures form the non-native or non-nativized structures of English and Sanskrit". The Marathi processes are not applicable to the English material mixed with the Marathi code, and the resulting insertion is therefore marked as non-native. The richness of the data from Marathi is here acknowledged, and the examples do indeed show how the English material is kept separate from the host code by not adding the derivational suffixes, conjunctive particles, and adverbs of English to the Marathi material. In contrast to the English material, the Sanskrit material is assimilated to Marathi, and this assimilative process, according to Pandharipande, adds prestige to Marathi in the religious/traditional as well as in the modern formal domains. Returning to the issue of constraints as posited by Poplack, Pandharipande argues that no universal constraint can be shown to operate as Marathi—English and Marathi-Sanskrit abide by different structural constraints. As for the constraints posited by Myers-Scotton, these apply only in part. Pandharipande says that the System Morpheme Principle only applies to Marathi-Sanskrit, but not to Marathi-English. On the other hand, the Morpheme Order Principle proposed by Myers-Scotton does apply to both

Introduction

11

language pairs. The last two sections of the paper deal with the role of attitudinal factors in codeswitching and the strategies for maintaining Sanskrit as a guest code, both pointing to the fact that not only the virtual closeness or distance of the codes must be considered, but also the question of how speakers themselves perceive this relationship. Rosita Rindler Schjerve, in turn, seeks to evaluate codeswitching in the context of language shift in Sardinia. Her study is rooted in the theoretical work of Myers-Scotton and, in particular, in the latter's concept of "deep borrowing", that is to say, borrowing of not only lexical but also grammatical items. As a follower of Myers-Scotton's theoretical framework, she conceives of codeswitching as an operation in which one language serves as matrix, and the other as embedded language, thus subscribing to the notion that there is always one language that holds a dominant position in the language frame. Both of Myers-Scotton's principles, the Morpheme Order Principle and the System Morpheme Principle, including her notion of embedded language islands, are considered viable principles in the analysis of codeswitching patterns. The scenarios of Italian-Sardinian codeswitching that Rindler Schjerve examines range from a situation of intensive language contact and unmarkedness of both codes to role-change between the matrix and the embedded language in the direction of markedness and on to situations of language death. In her research questions, Rindler Schjerve wishes to investigate the functional hierarchy of social, socio-psychological and discursive functions of codeswitching, explore the extent to which codeswitching occurs in both directions, identify the forms or types that occur, and, finally, determine the extent to which codeswitching favors language shift. The data of her corpus are then described, data which are part of a larger corpus. The codeswitched utterances are classified into turn- and intra-turn-specific switches and are also examined according to functional criteria yielding three functional types that are then evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively. A number of informative citations provide examples of the different functional types. As for the direction of codeswitching, it is interesting to note that there is one third more codeswitching into Italian than into Sardinian. Important for the matter of language shift, however, is the fact that "in conversations where Sardinian is the matrix language, codeswitches (S > I [Sardinian > Italian]) only mark transitory shifts but can in no way be seen to threaten the dominance of the matrix language". In an interesting subsection concerning the sociolinguistic profile of the codeswitching type, Rindler Schjerve pursues the question of possible links between the choice of codeswitching types and factors such as competence, age, gender, education, and network of the speaker. She notes

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Rodolfo Jacobson

in this respect that on the whole "the more open a speaker's network is, the stronger is his/her tendency to switch into either direction". A qualitative analysis of the majority of converstations in which Sardinian is clearly the matrix language shows that the Sardinian lexical patterns are restructured according to Italian patterns. On the whole, the matrix- and embedded-language materials are, however, kept apart, so that the mixing of the two morphologies is not yet occurring. On the other hand, many young speakers display a tendency toward Italian rather than Sardinian as a matrix language. Rindler Schjerve concludes that, even though large scale relexification occurs in the direction of Italian, the grammatical system of Sardinian seems to be resistent to foreign influence.

Section 1 General issues and new frontiers

Codeswitching, codemixing, and code alternation: What a difference Hendrik

Boeschoten

1. Internal variation in contact varieties Let me begin my paper with the following anecdotal piece of evidence: In modern Turkish, no plural is used with noun phrases with a quantifier, i. e., iki gocuk 'two children', and not iki gocuk-lar (pi.). The rule is presented as an exceptionless obligatory role of grammar. Now, in second generation Turkish in Germany plural marking apparently often occurs in this case in violation of the rule. There seems to be nothing wrong here with an explanation in terms of interference of German but, as always in cases of contact induced change, it is of interest to know whether any sort of minor ("marked") rule exists in Turkish for plural marking with quantified nouns. In any sort of discussion I have had on the issue, this possibility was hotly denied by my Turkish colleagues. 1 Incidental examples like, e. g., ϋς Silah§örler 'the Three Musketeers' and Kirk Haramiler 'the Forty Thieves' are discarded as lexicalized items. The question remains why examples like these exist in the first place. In earlier stages of the language, numerals + nouns in the plural are clearly attested. In a recent edition (or rather: translation into modern Turkish) of a collection of short stories by the fin-de-siecle writer Halid Ziya, one occurrence of iki kiz-lar 'two girls' is deemed worth a footnote ("because we think the writer used the plural on purpose we left the expression as it is"!),2 and there are other similar examples to be found in the same text. There is no need to assume that the (at least) marginal possibility of combining numerals with the plural has disappeared from all varieties of Turkish, but the construction has gone underground on account of relentless attacks by all schoolmasters, and it is by now exceedingly difficult to get confirmation of its existence by means of elicitation or acceptability judgements. Discussions of the problem with my colleagues in retrospect were ever so many elicitations of researchers' attitudes to a linguistic norm. This particular norm, stated rigidly, very much looks like a schoolmasters' norm. Even so, linguists seem ready to accept it with no questions asked from the descriptive angle. Only after I was able to point out

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Boeschoten

examples in a written text did I get any sensible reactions to the problem described at all. At first sight this anecdote appears to have little bearing on my subject. But it has. It is often surmised by researchers that marginal patterns in one of two contact languages may correspond to basic patterns in the other and thus facilitate codeswitching and interference in general, leading to convergence. One manifestation of this idea is Myers-Scotton's "strategy 2" (for accommodating the Morpheme Order Principle, cf. Myers-Scotton 1993b: 92-97).

2. Codeswitching theories I approach my basic theoretical concern about codeswitching research first from the perspective of the way the notion of codeswitch and other terms are employed in the literature. Next I will discuss the relationship between codeswitching and language change. Finally, I will return to the concept of norms and their meaning in a dynamic bilingual setting. 2.1. State of the art One perspective starts from the following observations one may make when reading literature on language-mixing phenomena. First: Although codeswitching is generally employed as a cover term for language-mixing phenomena, this usage creates misgivings even with some who use it in this way. The term stresses the dimension of sociolinguistic motivation — i. e., the interface between language choice and language mixing - but cause problems on the structural level, because it is inconceivable that all language mixing phenomena should be located at switching points on the surface. Second: A number of authors, most notably those working in the Indian context, but lately also Peter Auer, continue to stress the inherent difference between codemixing and codeswitching, both from a social and from a structural perspective (Kachru 1982: 25—52; Auer 1990: 69-92). Since their judgement seems to be firmly rooted in their intuition, the difference should not be lightly discarded. Nevertheless, the relationship between these two concepts (if they are recognized as separate concepts at all) has been defined in very different ways. The definition of codemixing given by Bokamba (1988: 21—62), for instance, is devoid of sociolinguistic considerations; for him codemixing coincides with intrasentential

Codeswitching,

codemixing,

and code alternation

17

codeswitching. 3 With Auer (1990: 82-85), on the other hand, the concept of code-alternation is a sociolinguistic one. Code-alternation (comprising codeswitching and "transfer") is said to occur in communities which exhibit a preference for the use of one language at a time in conversation; in communities without such a preference we find codemixing. With this, I think, we have come full circle. Codemixing in this definition seems to be exactly the kind of linguistic behavior that Uriel Weinreich's "ideal bilingual" is not supposed to practice. Third: During the last few years it has become fashionable to make a distinction between "insertional codeswitching" and "codeswitching proper". I will not consider the borrowing vs. loanword distinction which has proven to be particularly unfruitful. Fourth: the concept of a matrix language was first brought up in connection with the quest for a language index for any sort of mixed utterance. The issue could not be resolved, and this point is decidedly worrying for those who want syntactically neat descriptions (Nishimura 1986: 123-144). Myers-Scotton (1993), on the other hand, tries to circumvent the difficulty by defining the matrix language on the basis of morpheme frequency more or less on the discourse level. Fifth: If for whatever reason a matrix language is assumed, be it as an overall characteristic, or on the sentential level, then we are automatically dealing with the asymmetrical distinction: host language vs. guest language; function and meaning of guest-language forms are per definition different if mixed/switched into the host language from their function and meaning in the guest language itself. Johanson (1993: 197-221) draws attention to this fact by using (intra-clausal) code-copying as a term for insertional codeswitching, thus elaborating on the line of thought initiated notably by Haugen. Sixth: the notion of "switch" remains problematic. Of course, at least in the use of codeswitching as a cover term the term "switch" cannot be taken literally, because insertional codeswitching (like, e.g., code-copying) does not entail any switch from one language (or, for that matter, matrix language) to the other. The term "switch" refers to language choice, and possibly to a psycholinguistic notion relevant to models of production (Sridhar-Sridhar 1980: 407—416). In order to avoid difficulties with the definition of the concept of a matrix language, Myers-Scott o n - J a k e (1995: 981-1024) propose that CP (or S) should be selected as the minimal level for intersentential switching. I do not think this is feasible, because counter-examples like the following are found in the literature:

18

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Boeschoten

(1)

Marathi-English (Pandharipande 1990) To ghari älä ani [0 ENJOYED THE ICECREAM], he came home and 'He came home and enjoyed the icecream.'

(2)

Turkish—Dutch (Backus, unprinted data) Qok mutlu-yum yani böyle ol-dug-um-a very happy-COP lsg INTER J so be-VN-POSSlsg-DAT EN

NIET ANDERS.

and not different 'I'm glad I'm like this, you see, and not different.' The examples are very similar, in that an analysis in terms of "switches" on a boundary between conjoined sentences from two different languages breaks down. In (1) Marathi would require an overt subject in the second clause, and in (2) Turkish would require a verb form. I fail to see how these examples of deletion can be explained, if one were to assume that a language switch takes place without the two conjoint sentences being bound in some way.4 As for the terminology I have been discussing, the various terms and the approaches going with them, can be roughly summed up as in Table 1. Table 1. Summary comparison of different terms and their implications Term

Meaning

Implication for intrasentential mixing

Problems

Dimension of change

Codeswitching

switch L x > Ly

switching site(s)

neglected

Codemixing

intrasentential

defined as intrasentential

insertional codeswitching; single word switches relation with codeswitching

Language mixing Code alternation (Intra-causal) Code copying

cover term

none

too vague

language choice

none

the relationship with mixing only applicable to the asymmetric case; language vs. parole

insertional fixed matrix lanswitching (apart guage assumed from implications for interference and loans)

possibly leading to mixed language? none none integrated into the model (but no theory on change in progress)

Codeswitching, codemixing, and code alternation

19

2.2. Codeswitching and language change The point I want to make in the present contribution is the following. In codeswitching theory in general, questions pertaining to linguistic change are shunned, with the notable exception of loan vs. borrowing, nonce borrowing, etc. Why questions of change can and should be raised for lexical items, but not for other linguistic elements, is never motivated at all as far as I know. In particular it is assumed that loanwords may enter a language more or less instantaneously (e.g., Myers-Scotton's "cultural borrowings"). Now, consider examples like the following. First a pattern which is rather common in a corpus of second generation Turkish (3a): (3)

a. Turkish-German (Boeschoten, 1994) Lust-UM YOK KITAP OKU-MAG-A pleasure-POSSlsg there is not book read-INF-DAT Ί don't feel like reading books.'

The utterance is interesting for the following reason. German and Turkish have closely resembling options to express the same meaning: (3)

b. Ich habe keine Lust zum Bücherlesen. Ich habe keine Lust, ein Buch zu lesen. c. Kitap okumaga hevesim yok. Hevesim yok kitap okumaga.

Now, the first possibility in (3c) conforms to the standard SOV [Subject object—verb] word order of Turkish, whereas the second option does not (while being completely normal in spoken Turkish). The possibility (3d), however, does not occur in the corpus and sounds decidedly odd to bilinguals: (3)

d.

KITAP OKUMAGA

Lust-UM

YOK

To sum up: The lexical item Lust does not induce a new syntagmatic structure into the host language (Turkish), as there is a similar construction in use in Turkish (I suppose Myers-Scotton would term this a high degree of "congruence"). Nevertheless it seems to me that the case exemplified in (3a) points to a probably instantaneous syntactic change, i.e., a drift of SOV [Subject-object-verb] to SVO [Subject-verb-object] order: The German order main sentence — subordinate sentence is reproduced (as far as the global distribution of complex sentences is concerned). The example highlights the importance of pragmatically marked patterns (as was pointed out above).5

20

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Boeschoten

Now take the following example from the speech of the Moluccan migrants 6 in the Netherlands: (4)

a. Melaju Sini-Dutch (Voigt 1994: 47) Sekarang now 'The how b. Hari ini day this

DE

berapaSTE? the howmanie- st maniest is it now'; i. e., 'What day do we have?' berapcP. / Sekarang berapal how-many / Now how many

The predicate in this construction is a replica of its Dutch counterpart (de hoeveelste). In spoken Malay the question could have been expressed as in (4b), so that the phrasing in (4a) looks like an example of rule addition. Comparing (3a) with (4a), one should notice that the second example stems from a contact situation that has been established much longer: the Moluccans have been in the Netherlands since 1951, whereas Turkish immigrants only began to arrive in the sixties (their families in the seventies). Anyway, example (4a) may well be considered a legitimate Melaju Sini utterance. Besides, from the structural point of view the situation is different with respect to the measure of congruence between the contact languages involved. But as far as I can see, neither point affects the argument as far as the relationship between codeswitching and language change is concerned. A proper analysis of examples like these question the autonomy of codeswitching theory vis-ä-vis the study of other contact phenomena. Researchers with a linguistically oriented interest in the field often discuss codeswitching in terms of an interaction between two separate and totally independent grammars. Myers-Scotton (1993) prefers not to discuss the effects of codeswitching in terms of language change. In her view codeswitching may play a certain role in diachronic change, but rather in the long run, and not instantaneously. There exists a widespread view that general codeswitching can be studied in isolation from the problem of instantaneous and short-term linguistic change, because those changes can be guessed to be marginal at best. To my mind this view is ill-founded. It makes me uneasy to see that there is generally much attention for the loan vs. borrowing dimension in connection with codeswitching (and, indeed, loan words are said to originate in codeswitching), while other levels of linguistic analysis are said to behave differently in this respect. I have tried to point out the delusive usage of the term codeswitching to cover up this situation. One scholar who is highly sceptical

Codeswitching,

codemixing,

and code alternation

21

about the possibility of codeswitching in isolation from linguistic change is Michael Clyne. His scepticism is based on a wide range of observations of language-contact phenomena. 2.3. Codeswitching

norms?

A natural corollary to the study of codeswitching as an interface of two independent systems is an emphasis on the psycholinguistics of the production of switches. Often the norms of the contact languages are taken for granted. Sure enough, there has been some criticism invoking the possible relevance of non-standard norms of the contact varieties in isolation. In the case of stable contact settings codeswitching might even be placed on a scale of sociolinguistic variation (e.g., Pfaff 1979: 291—318, the Indian case). But in general, and most notably for immigrant settings, it is assumed that language contact initially does not lead to change on the morphological or syntactic level. This can be maintained for the first generation at best. The remark made by Auer (1990: 340) to the effect that "... (immigrant communities) are too young and culturally unstable to have developed shared norms of language choice" is remarkably imprecise. Presumably Auer is referring to data like his own on Italian second generation adolescents in Germany. His comment raises the question of defining the concepts of "norm" and "community". There is a tendency to restrict the sense of both terms to rather large entities. In fact, such a thing as an immigrant community is not easily defined, especially in a linguistic sense. The "Turkish community in the Netherlands", for instance, may be an attractive concept for politicians, educationalists and the like, but is it a speech community? Well, of course it is. It would be strange if we were not to uncover some features in the local brand of Turkish that are typically "Netherlandic". There can be no question that here, too, political boundaries will be effective. On the other hand, it is reasonable to assume that norms in the sense of conventionalized patterns will develop in networks of limited scale: (extended) families, a group of families from the same region of provenance, peer group networks. 7 The sheer fact that it concerns commonly speech communities that are studied in the research suggests that codeswitching as verbal behavior has language-like properties, i.e., it is really not assumed to consist just of the combination of two completely independent systems. Codeswitching research among immigrant communities makes no sense without reference to these networks on the one hand, and to the measure of retention of territorially external norms imported from the country of

22

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Boeschoten

emigration on the other. This last proviso invites further comments. In the first place, the norms immigrants take with them are not confined to standard norms (a point by now recognized by most researchers). "Substandard" norms of the spoken language are often strongly reflected in the immigrants' mother tongue speech. Besides, in the case of the community languages which have been established in Western, Northern, and Central Europe as an outcome of the migration of workers from Mediterranean countries, a new type of bilingual situation has developed in which intensive contacts are sustained with the countries of emigration. Written and electronic media largely produced in, for example, Turkey help to further the standard norms of Turkish.

3. Codeswitching and norms Another central issue addressed here is the following. On the one hand linguists may be justified in treating codeswitching on scales of sociolinguistic variation as an interlinguistic phenomenon consciously manipulated by speakers. On the other hand, bilingual speakers should be taken seriously when they claim that certain language-mixing phenomena pertain to the realm of one of their languages - in the case of immigrants this language is of course the speakers' mother tongue. In this respect there is a world of difference between codeswitchers along the Germanic—Romance boundary (in Belgium and Switzerland; the Alsatian case is probably different), who are in effect practicing nothing else but language choice, and those codeswitchers who are mixing elements of another language into their own very knowingly, but without the intention to keep their languages "pure", even if they might claim adamantly that they deem this to be important. They simply are not pressed hard enough to do so. My objection against a restricted notion of "norm" requiring larger groups of speakers (i. e., standard norms, substandard norms) is not that it would not be useful. Rather one would expect that it, too, will be meaningful in some way (contrary to Auer's view). But there is no reason to assume that it is the only kind of norm to be considered. I refuse to allow for instantaneous linguistic change to be discarded axiomatically as a possibility. Candidates for newly arising norms are, in other words, any kinds of conventionalized linguistic behavior in networks of any size. Before a norm can become prescriptive, it in general has to be descriptively adequate for speech conventions in a network. 8 In this sense a

Codeswitching, codemixing, and code alternation

23

network may consist of two persons who have developed private conventions of their own. I have put forward the claim that more or less instantaneous conventionalization must play a major part in shaping codeswitching patterns. This is not to deny the need for intralinguistic rules of grammar such as constraint rules if one wants to predict linguistically mixed speech production. It has become clear by now, however, that this interlinguistic potential cannot be disentangled from the sociolinguistic conditions defining specific contact situations. From the perspective of language change this interplay of context and structure can result in very different tendencies: convergence on the basis of congruent properties (like Turkish-Dutch example in (3a)), as well as the calquing and/or borrowing of very incongruent structures (like the Melaju Sini/Dutch example in (4a)).

4. In conclusion Ever since codeswitching emerged as a separate research topic, the perspective of language change has been shunned. Although in the original approaches by Weinreich and Haugen problems of change were addressed, the mechanisms of change were not. The main reason for this neglect is a rigid concept of linguistic norms, which makes the problem of synchronic fallacy (or, in other terms, the transition problem) look unassailable. In this connection, it is especially the concept of "matrix language" which needs clarification. As we have seen, the various ways of defining this concept, or rather our failure to come up with a precise definition, are ultimately all connected with the problem of change.

Notes 1. The matter was originally raised by Carol Pfaff in connection with Turkish—German contact in Berlin (cf. Pfaff 1990: 115). 2. Halid Ziya U§akligil, Solgun Demet, Istanbul: inkilap Kitabevi 1987: 201. The example is not the only one of its kind in the book. The exclamation marks are mine. 3. Cf. also Myers-Scotton (1993: 24, fn. 2). 4. The Turkish—Dutch example in (2) needs some further explaining. In standard Turkish the utterance "I am happy that I am like this" would be rendered as in (ia). Moreover, in spoken Turkish (ib) is quite acceptable: (i) (i)

a. [Böyle olduguma] mutluyum. b. Mutluyum [böyle oldugumal]. Ί am happy that I am like this.'

24

Hendrik Boeschoten Extraposition of an adjunct AP like the Dutch example in (iib) is not allowed in Turkish: (ii)

a. Ik ben blij dat ik sterk en gezond ben. I am glad that I strong and healthy am b. Ik ben blij dat ik sterk ben en gezond. c. Mutluyum kuvvetli ve sihhatli olduguma. happy-lsg strong and healthy be-NOM-POSSlsg-DAT d. * Mutluyum kuvettli olduguma ve sihhatli.

In other words, the speaker in (2) seems to produce a sentence with an overall Dutch structure in which the adjunct AP en niet anders is moved following a rule of Dutch. Actually, in the case of (2) the discrepancy between Turkish and Dutch structure is even greater than suggested by (iic) and (iid), because of the negation. The monolingual equivalent of (2) would be as in (2a) (leaving out the interjection yam): (2)

a. £ok mutlu-yum böyle ol-up ba§ka ol-ma-dig-im-a very happy-lsg thus be-CONV different be-NEG-NOM-POSSlsg-DAT Ί am glad I'm like this, you see, and not different.'

(The converb /-up/ in olup is an adverbial form of the verb copying the tense/aspect markers of the following verb ol-). Alternatively, (2) could be analyzed as the result of gapping (i. e., the deletion of the verb in the Dutch stretch) which would also be impossible in a Turkish sentence (this analysis would make (2) more similar to the Marathi-English example in (1)). It should be noted that the utterance in (2) is only possible because Turkish allows the alternative word order in (ib). Utterances like (2b) or (2c) would be impossible: (2)

5.

6.

7.

8.

b. *[Böyle olduguma] EN NIET ANDERS mutluyum. c. *[Böyle olduguma] mutluyum EN NIET ANDERS.

Thus, in (2) we also have an example of convergence based on non-standard word order. The patterns in which SVO-word type order variation in spoken Turkish comes into play in mixed Dutch (German)-Turkish utterances at the same time also reflect distinctive Dutch (German) idiom (see n. 3; cf. also Boeschoten, 1994: 253-264). I tend to think that this use of the alternative word order in Turkish is not just syntactically motivated, but that it is also related to the asymmetrical contact setting (without reference to the concept of matrix language in a particular discourse setting). Thus, structures like (2) and (3) are predicted not to occur in a contact setting in which Turkish would be the dominant language and Dutch (German) the immigrant language. These Moluccans, 90% of whom were from the island of Ambon, were forced to migrate to the Netherlands in the early fifties. Their linguistic repertoire included several varieties of Malay spoken by the group and their offspring in the Netherlands. McConvell (1994, Unpublished manuscript) coins the term "frozen codeswitching" for a situation in which children acquire a mixed variety of Gurundji (an aboriginal language) and Kriol as a first language. The question arises whether this just boils down to saying that codeswitching has become the norm in the community, and why then create a new term for the occasion? I can think of one exception to this principle (in the case of standard languages): Language purists have occasionally succeeded in introducing outrageous innovations which were presented as normative from the outset.

Codeswitching: An unequal partnership?* Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E. Davies

0. Introduction Within the literature concerning structural constraints on codeswitching, two opposing positions can be distinguished. On the one hand, we find treatments in which the two languages involved in codeswitched discourse are regarded as equal partners with all constraints applying in the same way to both; on the other hand are those accounts in which a distinction is drawn between the roles of the two languages. In this chapter, we should like to look particularly at this second position, examining some potential sources of inequality between two languages and using our own data on Arabic-French codeswitching by Moroccans in order to consider whether and how these equalities influence the nature of the occurring switches.

1. Views from the literature When the structure of codeswitched discourse began to attract more attention in the 1970s, a number of researchers presented specific observations concerning particular language pairs. Some of these clearly assumed a distinction between the roles of the two languages. For instance, concerning Arabic-French switching, Abbassi (1977 [unpublished]) claims that the French complementizer que can only be followed by a clause in the same language, whereas this is not true of the equivalent Arabic complementizer which can introduce a clause in either language. A more recent example of such reported asymmetries comes from Eid (1992: 5 0 72), who finds that in Egyptian Arabic-English codeswitching an English clause may be followed by complementizer and clause in Arabic, whereas the reverse pattern, consisting of an Arabic clause followed by an English complementizer and clause, does not occur. However, as interest shifted towards the search for much more general, possibly universal constraints, little attention seems to have been paid in the 1980s to such asymmetries. The Equivalence Constraint and Free Morpheme Constraint proposed by Poplack (1980b: 581-618, 1988:

26

Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E.

Davies

215-244), which have probably attracted more discussion than any other recent proposals, do not provide for any difference between the roles of the two languages. The same can be said of Di Sciullo—Muysken— Singh's (1986: 1 - 2 4 ) Government Constraint. For these researchers, then, the question of which language contributes which parts of the overall structure exhibiting a switch does not seem to be an issue at all. On the other hand, a brief survey of the numerous articles presenting counterexamples to one or more of these constraints reveals that the violations noted frequently result from switches in one direction but not in the other. This is particularly noticeable in the case of Poplack's Free Morpheme Constraint which "prohibits a code-switch between a bound and a free morpheme of different languages" (Poplack-Wheeler—Westwood 1987: 53). Examples not conforming to this constraint have been cited for many language pairs: Nartey (1982: 183-192) reports English stem with Adaqme affixes, Kamwangamalu (1987: 166-178, 1989b: 157—170) gives French verb stems with Lingala or Swahili inflections, Bentahila-Davies (1983: 301-330, 1992: 443-458) have French verb stems with Arabic inflections and Eliasson (1989: 1—28) has English stems with Maori affixes. It seems to us significant that no paper that we have come across has attested such word-internal switches in two directions. It is always one language which provides the roots and the other which provides the grammatical morphemes. Alongside the debate on these purportedly universal and languageneutral constraints, we also find a number of general observations invoking the idea of differential roles for the two languages. In 1983, we noted for Arabic—French codeswitching that, although such absolute and specific constraints as those proposed by Abbassi (1977) seem unjustified, nevertheless "in certain environments, switches in one direction are far more common than switches in the other" (Bentahila-Davies, 1983: 326). Petersen (1988: 479-493) draws a distinction between dominant and non-dominant language in the repertoire of a three-year-old bilingual and claims that grammatical morphemes from the dominant language can be attached to lexical morphemes of the non-dominant one, whereas the reverse never happens. Sridhar—Sridhar (1980: 209) use the terms "host language", defined as "the primary language of the discourse", and "guest language", proposing a Dual Structure Principle which allows for guest constituents, conforming to the rules of the guest language, to be inserted within a larger host language structure according to the rules of the latter. The labels "matrix language" and "embedded language", which seem to correspond roughly to Sridhar-Sridhar's notions of host and

Codeswitching: An unequal partnership?

27

guest languages, have been adopted by a number of researchers, notably by Joshi (1985: 190-205), who maintains that switching must always be from a category of the matrix language to one of the embedded language and never the reverse. We might also note Kamwangamalu's proposal (1989: 162) for a Matrix Code Principle which requires that "for a codemixed structure to be acceptable the morphosyntactic structure of the guest code must conform to the morphosyntactic structure rules of the host code". However, the most elaborately worked-out theory based on a distinction between matrix and embedded language is certainly MyersScotton's Matrix Language Frame Model (Myers-Scotton 1991: 2 0 7 232, 1992: 101-127, 1993) of which we shall have more to say below. Myers-Scotton's model is based on the assumption that, in any stretch of discourse involving codeswitching, it is "always" possible to identify a matrix language and an embedded language. The assumption that such an asymmetry is always present would also seem to underlie the position of those such as Treffers-Daller (1990: 259-277), who maintains that it is possible and desirable to provide a unified theory of both codeswitching and borrowing, with the same principles governing the two. While this position can be seen as one extreme, the other is represented by the postulation of completely language-neutral constraints, such as the Equivalence Constraint. However, it is of course possible to adopt a third position, between these two extremes, by maintaining that it may sometimes, but not always, be necessary to distinguish between a matrix and an embedded language. In fact, some of the more recent proposals made by Poplack and her associates (1988: 47-104), perhaps in response to criticisms of their original constraints, can also be seen as acknowledging - albeit inexplicitly - that the two languages in mixed discourse need not play equal and interchangeable roles. For instance, presumably to account for the numerous attested counterexamples to the Free Morpheme Constraint, Poplack has postulated a separate category of "nonce-borrowings" (Poplack, 1988: 581-618; Poplack-Sankoff-Miller 1988: 47-104) in order to cover cases where a single lexical item from one language is integrated to the morphological rules of the other language, the difference between this and "regular" borrowing then being that nonce-borrowing is a one-off occurrence spontaneously resorted to by the speaker, rather than being one recurrently used within the community. Potential counterexamples to the general constraints are thus recategorized, not as instances of "true" codeswitching, but as examples of this supposedly distinct phenomenon. In a rather similar way, M'Barek and Sankoff (1988:

28

Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E.

Davies

143—154) seek to account for numerous apparent counterexamples to the Equivalence Constraint in French—Arabic codeswitching by identifying yet another process which they call Constituent Insertion. This entails the insertion into a structure belonging to one language of a smaller constituent belonging to the other, the significant point here being that the internal structure of this inserted constituent need not conform to the structural requirements of the language of the larger structure (as is the case in fact with Sridhar and Sridhar's Dual Structure Principle). Thus, the Equivalence Constraint is circumvented, since constituent insertions are once again distinguished from "true" codeswitching. These ways of dealing with apparent counterexamples can of course be criticized as mere tricks of terminology, involving a proliferation of categories of mixed discourse which is mainly motivated by the desire to preserve otherwise untenable generalizations. One may well suspect a certain circularity in a position that maintains that the Equivalence Constraint and the Free Morpheme Constraint apply only to "true" codeswitching and then labels all patterns not conforming to one or the other of these as something other than true switching. On the other hand, as we shall argue later in this chapter, it may indeed be useful to recognize more than one mechanism underlying mixed discourse. At any rate, whatever the merits, or otherwise, of Poplack's distinctions, and whether or not the new names are judged to identify clearly distinct phenomena, one thing is clear: the concepts of nonce-borrowing and constituent insertion, unlike the analysis in terms of the equivalence and free morpheme constraints, do imply an inequality of status and difference of roles between the two languages. The fact that Poplack prefers not to include these kinds of mixture under the heading of codeswitching proper does not alter this point. Ultimately then, the difference between the standpoint of Poplack and her associates and that of, say, Myers-Scotton is perhaps not so much that the former do not differentiate the roles of the two languages in mixed discourse, whereas the latter does; rather, it is that Myers-Scotton maintains that such a distinction is always present and the others do not. That sometimes, at least, switching involves an unequal partnership between the two languages thus seems now to be widely acknowledged even by those who consider the prototypical case of switching to involve no such differentiation. The questions of what exactly this inequality consists in and from what source it originates are, however, not easily answered. A look at the positions of some of those who have invoked the notion of matrix, host, base, or dominant language reveals a remarkable lack of agreement as to how such categories are to be identified.

Codeswitching:

An unequal partnership?

29

2. The notion of matrix language A number of researchers distinguish the matrix and embedded languages on purely structural grounds. For Treffers-Daller (1990: 259-277) the "base language" of a sentence is the language of the finite verb; for Doron (1983: 35-59) and Joshi (1985: 190-205), the matrix language is the language of the first major constituent in the sentence. Nishimura (1986: 123-143), on the other hand, suggests several tests for the assignment of mixed structures to one language or the other, including word order, in the sense that where word order conforms to the rules of only one of the languages, the sentence is assigned to that language, although he also argues that in some cases sentences cannot be assigned to one language or the other. Nortier (1989), after offering examples where the criteria of first constituent/word and of main verb lead to implausible analyses, proposes using a combination of these and other criteria. Where the syntax is clearly that of one of the languages, that one will be regarded as the matrix language; if the syntax conforms to both languages' requirements, the language of the majority of constituents will be the matrix language. However, Nortier is still faced with cases where she feels that either it is not possible to identify a matrix language at all or the matrix language can be considered to change several times in the course of a single utterance or sentence. The rather desperate lengths that Nortier goes to in order to extract some kind of conglomerate definition, only to give up when faced with yet more problematic examples, suggest that a structural definition of matrix language may not be equally plausible for all sets of codeswitching data. There is also a danger of circularity here. If the matrix language is a concept intended to allow predictions about what structures are possible in switched discourse, then perhaps it should itself be given an independent definition; otherwise, it is all too easy to end up saying that each time the language changes, the matrix language has changed too, as Nortier ultimately seems to be doing in her remarks (1989: 157) on her problematic examples (255) and (256). While there may be some data sets for which a structural definition of the matrix language does make valid predictions (for instance, where the language of the first constituent or of the main verb always imposes its own word order on the rest of the sentence), none of the proposals made so far seem to have very general application to other language pairs. Therefore, some other researchers have looked elsewhere for justifications for the postulation of a matrix language.

30

Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E. Davies

Some researchers consider the notion of matrix language to have some kind of psychological or intuitive basis. According to Joshi (1985: 190), speakers and hearers are usually in agreement over which language a mixed sentence belongs to. Petersen (1988: 479-493) makes her distinction between dominant and non-dominant language on the basis of relative proficiency. Kamwangamalu (1989b: 157-158) argues that the matrix language is determined by sociolinguistic context and claims that, in the case of switching by members of an African community between an African language and a European one, the African language will usually be the matrix language, since "for some reasons, such as prestige associated with European languages, bilingual Africans tend to use words from European languages when they speak an African language, whereas the reverse, though not impossible, is not a common trend". In earlier discussions of her Matrix Language Frame Model, Myers-Scotton (1990: 66) invokes psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic criteria; for instance, she writes that "the matrix language is generally the language in which speakers have the higher proficiency" and that "the matrix language is generally the more dominant language in the community in terms of the number of domains in which it is the more unmarked choice". However, in later, more definitive versions of the model, while she maintains that the concept of matrix language has a social motivation, the single criterion she uses for identifying the matrix language is a quantitative one. "The matrix language," argues Myers-Scotton (1993: 232), "is the language with the higher frequency of morphemes in a discourse sample in which code-switching occurs." It can be seen, then, that researchers differ not only in the criteria they adopt for identifying the matrix language, but also with regard to the level at which they assume it should be identified. While some assume the sentence as the relevant unit of analysis (Joshi 1985: 190-205; Doron 1983: 35-59), Nishimura (1986: 123-143) explicitly argues that in complex sentences each clause should be treated separately for the purpose of language assignment. Nortier (1989) suggests a distinction between a micro-level (that of sentences) and a macro-level (that of discourse), so that a conversation whose base language is A can nevertheless contain individual sentences whose base language is B. As we have just noted, Myers-Scotton (1993) takes the discourse level to be definitive, but unfortunately her remarks on what exactly constitutes a discourse sample remain very vague. She does state that a discourse sample must contain more than one sentence (Myers-Scotton 1993: 68) but is less clear on the upper limit. Given the fact that she acknowledges that the matrix language may change in the course of a conversation (1993: 69) and also that

Codeswitching:

An unequal partnership?

31

discourse with one matrix language may nevertheless contain embedded language islands which may be "very extensive ... for example, an entire sentence" (1993: 156), it is extremely difficult to know how to apply her criterion. Should, for instance, an interaction containing four sentences dominated by one language that are followed by two more sentences dominated by the other be analyzed as having a single matrix language, calculated on overall morpheme frequencies, or should one recognize a change of matrix language within the interaction? Nor is it clear how one should view a conversation where one participant's contributions are clearly dominated by Language A and another participant uses almost exclusively Language B. It would seem logical to consider each speaker as using a different matrix language, but Myers-Scotton (1993: 218) seems to imply at one point that the matrix language must be shared by all the participants in a conversation. Finally, as we have already noted, some of Myers-Scotton's remarks seem to place the concept of matrix language at a much broader, societal level, when she talks of the matrix language of a whole community and even suggests that the matrix language of a community may change over a period of time. Kamwangamalu (1989b: 157-170) also seems to situate the matrix language at a societal level. Even this limited survey should suffice to illustrate that, while many researchers have felt the need to recognize some kind of inequality between the roles of the two languages in codeswitched discourse, quite diverse views have been expressed with regard to the nature and source of this inequality. It is by no means safe to assume that the various authors who use such terms as "base", "dominant", "host" and "matrix language" are dealing with essentially the same phenomenon. Instead, it may be necessary to recognize that there are a number of different respects in which the languages involved in codeswitched discourse may be considered unequal, and that any or all of these may have implications for the structure of switches. We should therefore like to attempt to separate out a number of these factors and the ways in which they may affect switching patterns, rather than arguing for a single unified concept of matrix or base language.

3. Sources of inequality To begin with the level of the individual bilingual, there will often be an inequality in the degree of proficiency attained in the two languages. We have already noted Petersen's (1988: 479-493) claims about the

32

Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E.

Davies

differential roles played by a child's dominant and non-dominant languages in her switching patterns. Poplack (1980: 581-618) reports differences between the types of switch preferred by what she calls "fluent" and "non-fluent" bilinguals, and we have found striking contrasts between the switching behavior of relatively balanced Moroccan bilinguals and that of Moroccans dominant in Arabic (Bentahila-Davies 1991: 369-403, 1992: 443-458). Another characteristic of the individual, which may often but not always correlate with proficiency, is the temporal priority of the first acquired language over any subsequently learned ones. The first language in many cases remains the one that the bilingual is most fluent in throughout his or her lifetime. Skills in it, however, may of course atrophy if it falls into disuse, as in the case of some immigrants. Even if this happens, the first acquired language may still retain a special status for the individual, who may continue to regard it as his or her own language, the one most closely identified with (Davies-Bentahila 1989: 267-293). This is just one of the ways in which a bilingual's languages may be considered unequal in status. One language may be especially associated with the family and intimate domains. Another language may serve as a marker of solidarity and in-group membership or as a symbol of particular cultural values, and this need not be the first acquired or best-known language. 1 A language learned through formal education - especially if it is a language of international communication - may possess a quite different type of prestige, being seen as a mark of education, openness towards the outside world, or modernity. Such contrasts in status or image can be expected to influence the direction and extent of switching. A switch from home language to international language may have rather different motivations from one in the reverse direction. Another source of inequality between the two languages may be the extent to which each is used. Contrasts here may exist at several different levels. One language may clearly dominate across the whole community, or each may be associated with particular domains, such as education or religion. Particular individuals may differ in the extent to which they use each language, depending on, say, the nature of their work or the people with whom they are most frequently in contact. Finally, relative frequency may be calculated for a specific discourse sample, as in MyersScotton's criterion for determining matrix language. Dominance at any one of these levels need not necessarily correlate with dominance at the others. A community which generally favors Language A may contain individuals whose repertoire is dominated by Language B, and these

Codeswitching:

An unequal partnership?

33

speakers who use Β far more than A may nevertheless participate in conversations dominated by A. Similarly, these quantitative inequalities need not correlate with any of the other potential contrasts, in the sense that people who are most proficient in Language A may nevertheless find their interactions dominated by Language Β (as may happen to recent immigrants); people living in a community dominated by Language A, which is also their first acquired language and the one they are most proficient in, may still conduct conversations dominated by Language Β (e.g., Moroccan students discussing a science course) and so forth. Given the fact that the two languages in a particular type of codeswitched discourse may contrast in any or all of these respects, at the level of discourse, of individual speakers or of whole communities, one may then ask whether there is any reason to assume that any one of these contrasts in particular has a definite part to play in determining the types of switch that may occur. This question is made more difficult to answer because some of these factors, such as relative proficiency and usage patterns, may not be apparent from simple observation but may themselves require elaborate investigation before their relationship to codeswitching can be evaluated. The criterion of dominance in discourse which MyersScotton takes as defining the matrix language, however, is much easier to use, even allowing for the vagueness in her definition, which we noted earlier. In our own data on Arabic—French codeswitching, at any rate, it is easy to find examples of discourse where one language quite clearly dominates over the other in quantitative terms, so that the matrix language can be identified quite uncontroversially by Myers-Scotton's criterion.

4. Some examples from Arabic—French discourse We should now like to look at a few examples in the light of the predictions made by the model proposed by Myers-Scotton. Very briefly, this model proposes that codeswitched discourse can be composed of three types of components: matrix language islands, which are constituents consisting entirely of matrix language morphemes and conforming to matrix language grammar; embedded language islands, which are composed of embedded language morphemes in accordance with embedded language grammar; and constituents containing morphemes from both matrix language and embedded language. It is claimed that the matrix language sets the frame for these matrix language and embedded language constituents, which means that the morpheme order in such

34

Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E. Davies

constituents must follow the rules of the matrix language and that all syntactically relevant system morphemes must also come from the matrix language. Myers-Scotton's definition of "system morpheme" does not correlate exactly with what others have called "closed class items". While system morphemes include verbal inflections, complementizers, determiners, quantifiers, the copula and some prepositions, such as those marking possession, there are other prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns which she identifies as "content morphemes". The proviso "syntactically relevant" is intended to allow for cases which, according to Myers-Scotton, are relatively rare, where for instance an embedded language noun in a mixed constituent bears an embedded language plural affix. She claims, in effect, that in all such cases the matrix language marker of plurality must also be present. Thus, although an embedded language system morpheme is found in such a mixed constituent, it is considered to be redundant and not syntactically relevant. However, Arabic—French discourse by Moroccans often features mixed language noun phrases which contain system morphemes from both Arabic and French. Such noun phrases conform to the rules of Moroccan Arabic, according to which demonstratives and the indefinite marker wahed require the noun that they modify to be accompanied by a definite article as well, yielding strings like had I mra 'this the woman' or wahed I bint 'one the girl (a girl)'. Switching is possible after either the first or the second of the two determiners, and, if it occurs after the first, the result is a noun phrase containing one Arabic determiner and one French one, as in had la femme 'this the woman' or wahed la fille 'one the girl'. This is clearly not a case of double morphology and neither determiner is redundant. Two such mixed constituents, had les cousins djali 'these the cousins my' and duk les poissons frais 'those the fish fresh' can be found in the following extract in which a girl is describing her holidays: (1)

had LES COUSINS djali zajjin men LA FRANCE these the cousins my coming from the France w^andhum2 LA VOITURE... nfa LA VOITURE djal and they have the car... with the car of xali... merra LA PLAGE, merra zzebel, uncle-my... Turn the beach, turn the mountain. p LA FORET, kul merra w fin. andna fih turn the forest every turn and where. We have in it DES PHOTOS derna LES PHOTOS bezzaf ON A MEME some photos, we made the photos much. One has even

Codeswitching:

An unequal partnership?

35

hakka wlad ?ammi zabu LA CAMERA, filmed, so sons my uncle brought the camcorder, they FILMÖW, FILM ana bbahumflbhar. ΈΐΐΜαηα MEME filmed, filmed us their father in the sea. he filmed us even f ttriq f L A VILLE. zabna ma?na xir rrabbi in the street, in the town, we brought with us plenty G o d djal LES SOUVENIRS, wahed ssuq Γandhum, men of the souvenirs one the market they have, of daksi Γandhum, IL EST IMMENSE Γandhum ... huwa U N that they have. It is enormous, they have... it one SEUL SOUQ walakin DIVISE EN PARTIES bhal fih LA single market but divided in parts like in it the PARTIE djal vi LES POISSONS haduk... kajnin LES PECHEURS. part of only the fish. those... exist the fishermen. LES PECHEURS ENFIN ma kajxesru LA JOURNEE djalhum The fishermen finally not waste the day their flbhar, kajzibu dak... duk LES POISSONS FRAIS in the sea, they bring that... those the fish fresh w kattelqaj Fjalat vi kajsriw vi LES POISSONS and you find the women only they buy only the fish ri Ifenn. only the art. 'These cousins of mine were coming from France, and they had a car, my uncle's car ... one day the beach, one day the mountains, one day the forest, every time somewhere different. We have photos there, we took a lot of photos. We even made a film. So, my cousins brought the camcorder, they filmed. Their father filmed us in the sea. He filmed us even in the street, in the town. We brought back with us loads of souvenirs. They have a flea market, what a market they have, it's enormous. They have ... it's all one market but divided into sections, like there's the section only for fish. Those ... there are the fishermen. The fishermen in fact don't spend all their day at sea, they bring that ... those fresh fish and you find women buying only fish, only the best.' FILME

A count of either words or morphemes in this sample will lead uncontroversially to the conclusion that, according to Myers-Scotton's criterion, the matrix language is Arabic. Myers-Scotton does in fact discuss the problem posed for the model by such constituents, citing another of our examples, dak la chemise 'that the shirt'. She assumes (quite without

36

Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E. Davies

justification, since she does not have access to the discourse from which this example was drawn) that the matrix language is again Arabic and suggests that the problematic presence of the French system morpheme "la" can be dealt with by considering "la chemise" as an embedded language island situated within a matrix language + embedded language constituent. While this solution does allow the model to cope with what would otherwise be unexplainable examples, the recognition of such internal embedded language islands seems to considerably weaken the original claim of the model, that is, that only matrix language system morphemes are used within mixed constituents. Now embedded language system morphemes are possible, provided that they can be analyzed as part of an island internal to the matrix language + embedded language constituent; to be so analyzed, the embedded language string "must be composed of at least two lexemes/morphemes in a hierarchical relationship" (Myers-Scotton 1993: 138). Myers-Scotton does, however, place a limit on this letout, since she maintains that "no single embedded language forms may be islands" (1993: 138). A lone embedded language system morpheme in an otherwise matrix language constituent, then, should be quite impossible. Yet this is precisely what dak in dak la chemise appears to be. As we noted earlier, Myers-Scotton assumes that the matrix language here is Arabic. However, a look at the short conversation from which this noun phrase was extracted leads to the conclusion that, by her own quantitative criterion, the matrix language here can only be French, as shown in dialogue (2) below: TE

(2)

RAPPELLE QUELQUE CHOSE, dak

LA CHEMISE?

a. That you recall something that the shirt? 'Does that remind you of something, that shirt?' ijjeh, snu hadV. hadi MA CHEMISE, hadft b. yes, what this? this my shirt this? lajxellik, rz?t hakdal kan I lun God preserve you, it came back thus? was the color djalha CREME. of her cream 'Yes, what's this? Is this my shirt, this one? God preserve you. Has it become like that? Its color used to be cream.' a. E H , BIEN, ELLE EST TOUJOURS CREME. Oh, well, she is still cream 'Well, it's still cream.'

Codeswitching:

An unequal partnership?

37

b . ELLE EST BLANCHE!

She is white! 'It's white!' a . ELLE EST BIEN, SAUF

It

is

MOI, JE COLLE UN PEU

well, except me, I stick

PARTOUT,

ALORS CE

QUI

a

little

FAIT . . .

everywhere, then this which makes ... 'It's good, except for me, I get sticky all over, so that means...' b. suf, ?andi wahed I JACKETTE, Suf was look, I have one the jacket look whether tzi rrftak it comes - with you. 'Look, I have a jacket, see whether it will suit you.' a. AVEC CETTE CHALEUR [laughs] AVANT QUE JE LA METTE . . . With this heat before that I it p u t . . . D'AILLEURS, hadi ma tadxul s f s serwal. Besides this not enters not in the trousers. 'With this heat [laughs]... before I put it o n . . . Besides, this one does not tuck inside the trousers.' The entire dialogue contains 44 French words and only 27 Arabic ones, while in the contributions of the author of the noun phrase, the dominance of French is even more marked: 36 French words as opposed to 8 Arabic ones. 3 It seems indisputable that speaker A here is using essentially French discourse, the only switches to Arabic being for one clause and for the demonstrative dak·, it is this isolated Arabic system morpheme, rather than the following French article, which would seem quite unexplainable in Myers-Scotton's model, since even the postulation of internal embedded language islands will not allow for this configuration. Examples of single Arabic system morphemes are in fact quite plentiful in discourse which is otherwise clearly dominated by French. The following stretches of discourse, (3)-(6), illustrate this style of switching: (3)

D u

MOMENT

OU

TU

Ν ' A S PAS D E

From the moment where you have no LE

BILLET,

the ticket Tu

AS

TU

PEUX

you can COMPRIS?

MEME

LE D O N N E R

even it give D u

REDUCTION

reduction A

/

in

BENJELLOUN.

to Benjelloun.

MOMENT

QUE

TU

PAIES

You have understood? From the moment that you pay

Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E. Davies

TARIF COMPLET, IL

tarif

Y

EN A

BEAUCOUP QUI

complete there are among them many

VENDENT LE

BILLET POUR DES

NOMS

who DIFFERENTS.

sell the ticket for ART-PART names differents. 'Provided that you have no reduction in the ticket, you can even give it to Benjelloun. Do you understand? Provided that you pay the full rate ... there are lots of people who sell their ticket to someone with a different name.' La,

LE

JEUNE

-

MAIS AU

No, the young — but PAS, AU

BOUT D'UNE ANNEE, MEME

at the end

BOUT DE TROIS MOIS

not, at the end COURANT, LE

running,

of a IL

of three months he can

JEUNE.

PUIS,

AS

ascend

QU'EST-CE QUE TU

CHAQUE FOIS

even

PEUT MONTER EN

the young. Then, what

QUAND TU

year

you want

MATERIEL NOUVEAU Ζ did.

when you have each time material new Tous LES SIX MOIS, HUIT MOIS ON A UN All the six months, eight months one has a MATERIEL NOUVEAU. T u

material

new.

CHAQUE FOIS

each

A

translate

PELOTONS A

ART-PART squads

to

MATERIEL. D ' A B O R D , EST-CE QU'ON

that the material.

First,

PEUT TRADUIRE? EST-CE QU'ON

can

amuse yourself

FORMER DES

I

new.

VAS PAS T'AMUSER

You not go

time to form

TRADUIRE dak

NE

in

VEUX

translate? Is it

is

PEUT -

that one can

that one JE N'EN

SAIS

- I of that know

RIEN.

nothing. 'No, the young person - but after a year, not even that, after 3 months he can rise fast, the young person. And then, what do you expect when you are always having new material. Every six or eight months, we get new material. You're not going to waste your time training squads to translate that material. First of all, can one translate? Can one — I don't know.' walakin ςΑ DEPEND DE QUEL DEGRE DE CONNAISSANCE but that depends on which degree of knowledge djal LA PERSONNE. Wanna A U N MOMENT DONNE, of the person Because at a moment given, LORSQUE, PAR EXEMPLE, MOI

when,

JE VEUX APPRENDRE

for example, myself I want to learn

Codeswitching: L'ANGLAIS

JE SUIS SUR

ET

An unequal partnership?

CERTAIN QUE JE VAIS

the English I am sure and certain APPRENDRE L'ANGLAIS,

learn culture

LA

go

learn

the

CIVILISATION ANGLAISE, C'EST POUR

and the civilization

POUVOIR

that I

PAS POUR APPRENDRE LA

the English, not to

CULTURE W

39

M'EN

English,

SERVIR SOIT

it is

to

POUR FAIRE EN MARCHE

be able to myself by it serve be it to make run U N APPAREIL wild APPRENDRE CERTAINS TECHNIQUES, a machine or learn certain techniques, C'EST

TOUT. D'AILLEURS, MEME LE

this is all.

Besides,

N'AI PAS BESOIN Ö'APPRENDRE LA

not need CA

to learn

ME SERT

FRAN^AIS, JE

even the French

I

CIVILISATION FRAN£AISE.

the civilization

French.

SEULEMENT POUR POUVOIR ETUDIER, C'EST

This me serves only

to be able

to study, that's

TOUT.

all. 'But that depends on the level of knowledge of the individual, because at a given time, when for example I want to learn English, I am sure and certain that I'm going to learn English, not to study English culture and civilization, it's to be able to use it either to make a machine work or to learn certain techniques, that's all. Besides, even French, I don't need to study French civilization. I use it just to be able to study, that's all.' la jbqa j CONFRONTER SES IDEES hadik, IL FAUT if he stays confront - 3 ps his ideas thus, it is necessary QU'LL

CHOISISSE QUELQU'UN QUI

that he choose PEUT LE

somebody

EST DE SON RANG, QUI

who is

of his rank

who

COMPRENDRE AU MOINS, MAIS POUR POUVOIR

can him understand at least but for to be able izi ?andi U N PETIT W jquli... U N PETIT, QU'EST-CE comes to me a little and says ... a little, what is it QU'lL

VA

COMPRENDRE?

AUTOMATIQUEMENT,

that he is going to understand? Automatically D'AILLEURS, hi

besides LUI, IL

he

PARCE

only because VA . . .

QU'IL EST PLUS

he

MEME S'LL

is LUI

GRAND QUE

more big DIT

than

MERDE, C'EST

he is going... even if he him says shit,

A

this is to

40

Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E. Davies

DIRE IL

say A

VA

DIRE

OUI. S ' l L

DIT

NON, LE

he is going to say yes. If he says no, TENDANCE A

has tendency

CROIRE b f i a t i n a IL

to believe that

VEUT

PETIT

the little LUI

CASSER

he wants to him break

LA GUEULE.

the mug. 'If he keeps questioning his ideas like that, he has to choose someone who is at his own level, who can understand him at least, but for a child to be able to come to me and tell me ... a child, what will he understand? Automatically, moreover, simply because he is bigger than him, he'll ... even if he tells him rubbish, that is, he'll say yes. If he says no, the child tends to think that he will beat him up.' We have quoted rather long passages here, so that it can clearly be seen that the matrix language, by Myers-Scotton's definition, can only be French here. Yet we find in (3) a switch to Arabic for the preposition / , corresponding to English 'in', which Myers-Scotton would certainly identify as a system morpheme (1993: 123), and in (5) a switch for the Arabic possessive preposition djal, which she explicitly identifies as a system morpheme (1993: 106). In (4), we have a matrix language + embedded language constituent, the noun phrase dak I materiel, in which, contrary to her predictions, both system morphemes come from the embedded language, with only the noun from the matrix language. In (6), we find the complementizer bfanna 'that" from Arabic in a complex sentence which is otherwise all French. Finally, in the first clause of the same example, a French (matrix language) verb occurs with an Arabic (embedded language) inflection, j-confronter, '3 pers. sing.-confront'. The Matrix Language Frame Model does not make the right predictions about any of these cases. Should we then conclude that the quantitative criterion, which MyersScotton uses to determine the matrix language, is not after all relevant in predicting what types of switch may occur? Rather than adopting this opposite extreme, we prefer to state merely that it is important to consider the interaction of the factor of discourse dominance with some of the other types of inequality we noted earlier. For instance, while extract (1) contrasts with extracts (2)-(6) with regard to which language dominates the discourse, at another level all these examples have something in common. The speakers in all cases have Arabic as their first language, the language acquired in the home in infancy, and French as a second language learned largely through formal

Codeswitching:

An unequal partnership?

41

education. For all of them, Arabic is the language of solidarity and national identity, while French is a language associated with education and sophistication (Bentahila 1983a). These contrasts concerning temporal priority and symbolic value remain constant, whether or not an actual stretch of discourse is dominated by French or by Arabic, and whether a particular speaker is more proficient in Arabic or equally fluent in both languages. It would appear, however, that they produce a tendency to favor quite different types of switch, depending on what the dominant language of discourse is. In samples like (1), the dominant language of discourse, Arabic, is also the first learned language and the language of identity. Apart from the problem posed by the occurrence of French determiners in mixed language noun phrases, an issue that Myers-Scotton attempts to deal with by postulating internal embedded language islands, the Matrix Language Frame Model seems on the whole to provide a reasonably plausible framework for the analysis of such discourse. Here it seems feasible to identify a matrix language which provides the structural frames, the embedded language being used mainly for lexical items — even if its nouns usually bring their articles with them - and for relatively infrequent short phrases or clauses which could be treated as embedded language islands under the Matrix Language Frame Model. It is certainly significant that the same congruity of discourse dominance and solidarity value is found in the Swahili-English discourse which the Matrix Language Frame Model was designed to account for. Discourse like that in (2)—(6), however, does not exhibit this kind of congruence. Here the dominant language of discourse is not the previously learned one or the one symbolizing identity, but is instead the "outsider" language with international rather than national connections. Significantly, again, Myers-Scotton's data set does not contain any conversation illustrating this configuration: the dominant language of discourse in her material is always Swahili rather than English. Accordingly, her model does not make accurate predictions about the switches occurring in our French-dominant discourse; on the contrary, as we have seen, the switches for isolated system morphemes illustrated in (2)—(6) should be quite impossible according to the Matrix Language Frame Model.

5. Mechanisms of switching In fact, the contrast between the switch patterns exemplified in (1) and those found in (2)—(6) lead us to suggest that it may be necessary to

42

Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E. Davies

recognize two quite different mechanisms at work here. In stretches of speech like (1), as we have already noted, it seems intuitively plausible to regard the bilingual as speaking what is essentially Arabic, into which some French constituents are inserted. There seems to be no problem with using descriptive labels such as "embedded language islands", "constituent insertions", or even in some cases "nonce borrowings" to refer to the French parts of such discourse, for all these terms seem to imply a process whereby units from one language are set within structures provided by the other. Such terms seem to us much less convincing when applied to the switches for grammatical items illustrated in (2)-(6), however. If instead we assume that bilinguals speaking their second language have not only to activate their command of this language but also in some sense to deactivate their command of the first, psycholinguistically prior language, then the momentary lapses into Arabic in (2)-(6) could perhaps be seen as slight failures of this deactivation process; to use a metaphor, they could be regarded as "leaks", whereby minor elements of the psycholinguistically prior or dominant language find their way even into what is clearly intended to be discourse in the second language. As well as the switches for items like determiners and complementizers, which fit indisputably in Myers-Scotton's class of system morphemes, there are many examples of switches for other grammatical closed class items. For instance, in extract (5), we find switches for the Arabic conjunctions walakin 'but', li^anna 'because', w 'and' and wlla 'or'. Other common patterns include switching for a single pronoun such as ana 'me' in (7) and hna 'us' in (8): (7)

had LES PHRASES kulhum JE LES CONNAIS MEME PAS These the sentences all I them know even not D U TOUT, MAIS EN LISANT

dak

LES CHAPITRES Hi

at all but in reading those the chapters which ktebt JE TROUVE DES TRUCS QUI COLLENT, I wrote I find ART-PART tricks that stick COMME ς A

ana

JE SUIS SÜR

ET

CERTAIN . . .

like that me I am sure and certain ... 'All these sentences, I don't know them at all, but in reading those chapters that I wrote, I find some things that make sense like that, me, I'm sure and certain...' (8)

a . T\J

NE

CROIS PAS EN L'ARABISATION?

You not believe in the arabization? 'Don't you believe in Arabization?'

Codeswitching: An unequal partnership? b . M o i , JE NE

Me,

43

CROIS PAS DANS LES MATIERES TECHNIQUES,

I not believe

in

the subjects

technical

SINCEREMENT, NON.

sincerely, no 'Me, I don't believe in it for technical subjects, sincerely, no.' a.

POURQUOI?

Why? 'Why?' b. C A

VA

RETARDER TROPDE

That will delay

FAUT,

complicate

VA

too many things, then that will

NOUS COMPLIQUER L'EXISTENCE.

us

CHOSES, PUIS £A hna,

CE

QU'LL

NOUS,

the existence. Us, this which it us

E'EST L'EFFICACITE.

lacks 'it is the efficiency. 'It will delay too many things, then it will make life more complicated. Us, what we need is efficiency.' Other examples which we feel could plausibly be seen as such "leaks" include the use, in French-dominated discourse, of relatively uninformative elements functioning as fillers. They may be comment clauses like fehmti 'do you understand?' in (9) or marfrf I don't know' in (10), or common idiomatic expressions like bhal daba 'for example' (11) and w daksi 'and that sort of thing' (12): (9)

C'EST

UNE PREDISPOSITION PSYCHOLOGIQUE QUI

This is a

predisposition

INFLUENCE L'LNDIVIDU,

psychological ET

QUI

SE

which PREPARE.

influences the individual, and which itself prepares. C'ETAIT SON SORT, fehmti, VOILA. This was his destiny, do you understand, that is it. 'It's a psychological predisposition which influences a person, and which is prepared. It was his destiny, do you see, and that's that.' (10)

C'EST

LA

CINQUIEME FEMME, JE CROIS,

ELLE A,

This is the fifth wife, I believe, she has, man^rf DIX-HUIT ANS. JE SUIS SÜR QUE ςκ I don't know, eighteen years. I am sure that that NE MARCHERA PAS.

will not work. 'It's his fifth wife, I think, she is, I don't know, eighteen. I'm sure it won't work.'

44

(11)

Abdeläli Bentahila and Eirlys E.

Davies

bhdl dabü JE ME I myself wake the morning, like now. I myself RASE wlla JE NE ME RASE PAS. A PLUS FORTE shave or I not myself shave At more strong JE ME

REVEILLE LE

RAISON, SI JE NE

MATIN,

ME

RASE PAS, JE NE

reason, if I not myself shave,

SUIS PAS A

I not am

at

L'AISE.

ease. Ί wake up in the morning, for example, I shave, or I don't shave. All the more reason, if I don't shave, I don't feel at ease.' (12)

C'EST

U N TYPE QUI

AIME

COMMANDER

LA

FEMME,

W

This is a type who loves commanding the woman, and daksi TOUT EN ETANT MODERNE, W daksi. that thing, all in being modern and that thing. ELLE N ' A PAS ACCEPTE.

She has not accepted. 'He is a man who likes to dominate the woman, and so on, while still being modern, and so on. She didn't accept that.' These highly available, very frequently used idioms from the underlyingly dominant language, Arabic, could be seen as filtering through the essentially French narrative or commentary at points where there is a gap or hesitation; they function as pausefillers, without bearing any real information, since the message itself is perfectly clear from the French alone. It should perhaps be pointed out here that we do not consider the tendency to resort to Arabic grammatical items and fillers when speaking French to be a sign of inadequate mastery of French on the part of the speaker. Vallduvi ( 1 9 8 8 : 3 7 3 ) , for instance, does suggest, following some observations by Pintzuk and Prince [no separate reference available], that switching to the first language for closed-class items is a feature of the speech of "incomplete" speakers of the L 2 who have "special difficulties" in assessing the closed class items of this L 2 . Such an interpretation does not seem appropriate for our data, however. On the contrary, as we have shown elsewhere, the people who use discourse of this type tend to be those who are extremely fluent in French and not those who are dominant in Arabic (Bentahila-Davies, 1 9 9 1 : 3 6 9 - 4 0 3 , 1 9 9 2 : 4 4 3 - 4 5 8 ) . The speakers of examples (2)—(12) are undoubtedly perfectly capable of sustaining discourse entirely in French where this is judged appropriate, as

Codeswitching:

An unequal partnership?

45

in formal situations, or where Arabic would not be appropriate, as when speaking to a non-Arabic speaker. The occasional leak from Arabic into French, rather than suggesting that speakers are unable to exclude their first language from their discourse, seems merely to be a way to indicate that they are not bothering to exert the control required to ensure total adherence to French. In other words, it is a marker of relaxed, informal speech. The presence of these brief incursions of Arabic, whose contribution to the message being expressed tends to be insignificant, may also have a symbolic function, signaling the speakers' Moroccan identity, even if they choose to converse mainly in French, the colonizers' and outsiders' language. In both the types of discourse that we have looked at so far, illustrated by (1) on the one hand and (2)-(6) on the other, the notion of discourse dominance does seem to be an interesting one, in that in each case one language clearly fulfills a much more important role than does the other. There is, however, another style of codeswitching used by Moroccan bilinguals in which there is no such clear contrast. This can be illustrated by the following speech (13): (13)

wahed nnuba kunt ana w thami. O N S'EST ARRETE one the time was I and Thami. We stopped JUSTE AU FEU ROUGE, ON PARLAIT. kunna byina exactly at the fire red, one talked, we were we want nmsiw I meraks ma nmsiw I meraks w kunt we go to Marrakesh not we go to Marrakesh and I was qrit. IL M'A vu ENSEIGNER W daksi, W I taught. He me has seen teaching and that thing and zajin hna, ON HABITAIT ICI. waqef, IL FAUT coming here, one lived here. Standing, it is necessary VOIR,

hda

LE

DIX-SEPTIEME ETAGE /

to see near the seventeenth floor in ROUGE fas zawlu zzerda red where they removed the garden sawbulha Igas ET J'ETAIS they put for it the concrete and I was

dak

LE

FEU

that the fire Iwstanija. vad the central just DEVANT, IL Υ

before,

there

AVAIT UNE CENTAINE DE VOITURES DERRIERE MOI, W

was a hundred of cars waqef. J'ATTENDS LE FEU POUR standing I wait the fire to COMME ΣΑ JE DEMARRE, JaSni, like that I take off. I mean,

behind

ana

me and I CHANGER, wahed sa