A community-based study of social, prosodic, and syntactic factors in code-switching
Open Access
- Author:
- Duran Urrea, Delfina Evelyn
- Graduate Program:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 27, 2012
- Committee Members:
- Rena Torres Cacoullos, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Rena Torres Cacoullos, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Chip Gerfen, Committee Member
Paola Eulalia Dussias, Committee Member
John Lipski, Committee Member
Catherine Travis, Special Member - Keywords:
- code-switching
discourse
bilingual speakers
New Mexico
New Mexican Spanish
intonation units
language attitudes
syntactic factors
word classes - Abstract:
- The phenomenon of code-switching (CS)—the alternation between two languages within a single discourse event—has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars in the last three decades. This study is based on the speech of members of a bilingual community in northern New Mexico, in which Spanish and English have been in contact for over 150 years. The data are 8,723 Intonation Units totaling 43,193 transcribed words and corresponding to approximately 4.5 hours of the 29 hours of recorded material, from conversations lasting from 45 minutes to two hours. 28 Spanish-English bilinguals born and raised in Mora County participated: 14 women and 14 men, 30 to over 70 years old. From this Mora, New Mexico Corpus (MNMC), 1,181 tokens of CS were extracted. The study focuses on social, prosodic, and syntactic considerations in CS. Information about acquisition and use of the two languages and linguistic attitudes were culled from the recordings, which, unlike answers obtained via a questionnaire, provide an indication of issues of concern to the community. Spanish language dominance, as evaluated by individual speakers themselves, appears to be correlated with older age and primary-school-level education. Prosodic units are important, though this is not a categorical constraint, in that 79% of all switches occur at Intonation Unit (IU) boundaries, with Spanish-dominant speakers showing a higher rate of CS internal to the IU. However, the direction of the switch is not correlated with language dominance and, in the aggregate, IU-internal CS occurs evenly from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish. Finally, with respect to syntactic considerations, the first word in CS is most frequently a closed-class item, a conjunction or preposition in Spanish and subject pronoun in English, while the word preceding a CS is usually an open-class item, in both languages. The most frequent combinations were: English noun / verb / adverb / pronoun + Spanish conjunction or adverb, and Spanish verb / noun / adverb / conjunction + English subject pronoun or adverb. These patterns were observed to hold for both kinds of CS, that is, at IU boundaries and IU-internally.