Multidisciplinary Approaches To Code Switching

The volume presents a selection of contributions by leading scholars in the field of code-switching. In the past the phenomenon of code-switching was studied within different subfields of linguistics and they all took their own perspectives on code-switching without taking into account findings from other subdisciplines. This book raises a question of a much broader multidisciplinary approach to studying the phenomenon of code-switching, calls for integration of disciplines; and illustrates how frameworks from one subfield can be applied to models in another. The volume includes survey chapters, empirical studies, contributions that use empirical data to test new hypotheses about code-switching, or suggest new approaches and models for the study of code-switching, and chapters that discuss principles and constraints of code-switching, and code-switching vs. transfer. The book is easily accessible to anyone who is interested in the phenomenon of code-switching in bilinguals.

This volume provides a sample of the most recent studies on Spanish-English codeswitching both in the Caribbean and among bilinguals in the United States. In thirteen chapters, it brings together the work of leading scholars representing diverse disciplinary perspectives within linguistics, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, theoretical linguistics, and applied linguistics, as well as various methodological approaches, such as the collection of naturalistic oral and written data, the use of reading comprehension tasks, the elicitation of acceptability judgments, and computational methods. The volume surpasses the limits of different fields in order to enable a rich characterization of the cognitive, linguistic, and socio-pragmatic factors that affect codeswitching, therefore, leading interested students, professors, and researchers to a better understanding of the regularities governing Spanish-English codeswitches, the representation and processing of codeswitches in the bilingual brain, the interaction between bilinguals’ languages and their mutual influence during linguistic expression.

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another. The thirteen contributions in this volume offer a glimpse of the diversity of bilingualism present in the Hispanic and Lusophone world, shedding light on the sheer variety of speaker communities, language pairings (e.g., Spanish-English, Spanish-Basque, Spanish-Dutch, Portuguese-Spanish-English, Portuguese-English, Spanish-K’ichee Maya, and Spanish-Ixcatec) and speaker types (e.g., simultaneous bilinguals, and early and late sequential bilinguals). The diversity present in this collection of papers, both in empirical coverage and methodological and theoretical approaches, will be of interest to a wide range of students and researchers in bilingualism and Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics.

​This book examines the under-researched field of communication by bilingual people with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). The aging population is increasingly affected by neurocognitive diseases such as DAT, and over the past 30 years, the growing research body concerned with monolingual DAT discourses has seen significant growth. The findings from monolingual studies and institutional settings highlight the importance of code choice for a person’s sense of autonomy, especially against the background of changing communicational abilities. Adding a new perspective, this book investigates how ten Puerto Rican speakers living with varying stages of DAT draw on their bilingual resources to accomplish verbal interaction in informal settings with their primary care partners. Drawing on narrative interviews conducted in Orlando, Florida, this multi-case study investigates situated language choices and code-switches by applying the ethno-social approach, i.e. combining features of conversation analysis and ethnography of communication. The author sheds light both on the question of how people living with DAT engage in conversations and which strategies they employ in their languages (English and Spanish) to reach their communicative goals. Specifically, by analyzing the role of code choice and code-switching in a qualitative manner, two main functional categories emerge: discourse-related and participant-related code-switching. Bilingual competencies remain even among participants living with severe DAT symptoms, as evident in retained interactional sequences such as salutations. Persons living with DAT competently negotiate code, either through exploratory code-switching or metalinguistic commentary, emphasizing the need for conversational partners to be sensitive to the communicative needs, in both languages, of speakers living with DAT. This book will be of interest to students and researchers working on dementia discourses, health communication, multilingualism and ageing, as well as Bilingual/ Multilingual families or individuals living with dementia.

The study of code-switching has been carried out from linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspectives, largely in isolation from each other. This volume attempts to unite these three research strands by placing at the centre of the enquiry the role played by social factors in the occurrence, forms, and outcomes of code-switching. The contributions in this volume are divided into three parts: “code-switching between cognition and socio-pragmatics”, “multilingual interaction and identity”, and “code-switching and social structure”. The case studies represent contact settings on five continents and feature languages with diverse linguistic affiliations. They are predictive and descriptive in their research goals and rely on experimental or naturalistic data. But they share the common goal of seeking to explain how social structures, ideologies, and identity impact on the grammatical and conversational features of code-switching and language mixing, and on the emergence of mixed languages. Given its scope, this volume is a significant addition to the empirical and theoretical foundations of the study of code-switching. It is also of relevance to the general debate on the inter-relationships between language and society.

In the complex, multilingual societies of the 21st century, codeswitching is an everyday occurrence, and yet the use of students’ first language in the English language classroom has been consistently discouraged by teachers and educational policy-makers. This volume begins by examining current theoretical work on codeswitching and then proceeds to examine the convergence and divergence between university language teachers’ beliefs about codeswitching and their classroom practice. Each chapter investigates the extent of, and motivations for, codeswitching in one or two particular contexts, and the interactive and pedagogical functions for which alternative languages are used. Many teachers, and policy-makers, in schools as well as universities, may rethink existing ’English-only’ policies in the light of the findings reported in this book.

Code-switching - the alternating use of several languages by bilingual speakers - does not usually indicate lack of competence on the part of the speaker in any of the languages concerned, but results from complex bilingual skills. The reasons why people switch their codes are as varied as the directions from which linguists approach this issue, and raise many sociological, psychological, and grammatical questions. This volume of essays by leading scholars brings together the main strands of current research in four major areas: the policy implications of code-switching in specific institutional and community settings; the perspective of social theory on code-switching as a form of speech behaviour in particular social contexts; the grammatical analysis of code-switching, including the factors that constrain switching even within a sentence; and the implications of code-switching in bilingual processing and development.