Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Codeswitching (CS) is commonly defined as the alternating use of two or more codes in the same conversational event. The term was first employed to refer to the coexistence of more than one structural system in the speech of one individual by JAKOBSON, Fant, and Halle (1952), who use "code" in the abstract information theoretical sense. In later writings, "code" has come to be synonymous with "language" or "speech variety." Recent research on CS falls within two distinct traditions: the syntactic, providing insights into the linguistic principles that underlie the form that CS takes; and the pragmatic that relates linguistic form to function in everyday discourse.
Contrary to common assumptions, CS is most frequent among proficient multilinguals. CS may be intersentential or intrasentential, the latter exemplified in the English-Spanish utterance, "Codeswitching among fluent bilinguals ha sido la fuente de numerosas investigaciones" ("has been the source of numerous studies"), and the English-Japanese, "That's how you say it nihongo de" ("in Japanese"). The status of such intrasentential CS had been much in dispute: some linguists view it as indicative of imperfect language acquisition or interference. However, later studies reveal that intrasentential CS requires advanced competence in the syntactic systems involved. Particularly significant is the fact that intrasentential CS demonstrates grammatical regularities, reflecting underlying, unconscious principles that speakers rely on in distinguishing between permissible and unacceptable switches.
The notion of grammatical equivalence has played an important role in the syntactic analysis of CS. One early formalization is Poplack's (1980) "Equivalence Constraint," according to which codes will be switched at points where the surface structures of the languages map onto each other. This premise has been challenged by studies on CS in typologically dissimilar languages (Romaine 1989). More recently, researchers have introduced CS data into the discussion of universal grammar, as advanced in Chomsky's principles and parameters framework (Chomsky 1981, 1986), maintaining that the relevant constraints on CS should exploit syntactic distinctions and relations already extant in the grammar. This line of inquiry was initiated by Woolford (1983), who developed a generative model of CS. Since that time, investigations into the properly syntactic principles underlying CS patterns have grown significantly in number and scope: Di Sciullo, Muysken, and Singh (1986) propose the Government Constraint, invoking this syntactic-theoretical hierarchical relation in disallowing CS between certain elements in the sentence; Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio (1994) propose the Functional Head Constraint, a specific application of the general X-bar theoretical process of feature checking that holds between a functional head and its complement (see X-BAR THEORY); and McSwan (1997) demonstrates the proper role of CS constraints within Chomsky's (1993) Minimalist Program. The validity of the aforementioned works relating CS to grammatical competence is further corroborated by investigations focusing on the development of CS ability in children acquiring multiple languages simultaneously. Especially noteworthy are writings by Jürgen Meisel (1990, 1994), whose findings on the syntactic regularities underlying early CS provide theoretical insights obscured in the investigation of monolingual acquisition. These developments make clear that the study of CS has reached a dimension of inquiry that can be informed by, and at once contribute to, the continued advancement of syntactic theory.
Pragmatic approaches to CS deal with the relation between structure and function in everyday speech exchanges, and cover a wider, often more loosely defined range of switching phenomena. Talk is treated as discourse level intentional action, where actors communicate in the context of social groupings, be they speech communities, social, ethnic, professional, or other interest groups (Hymes 1967; Clark 1996), acting in pursuit of context-specific communicative ends (Grice 1989). The verbal resources of such human populations are described in terms of inherently variable linguistic repertoires (Labov 1972) that, depending on local circumstances, consist of either grammatically distinct languages or dialects, or styles of the same language (Gumperz 1964; Hymes 1967). The use of one or another of the available coexisting codes (languages, dialects, styles, or speaking genres) serves a variety of rhetorical functions, for example to engage the listener, to shift footing, to mitigate or strengthen a speech act, to mark reported speech, and to repair or clarify. In this way, language switching can be said to be functionally equivalent to style shifting in monolingual speech (Zentella 1997).
A common claim is that syntactic and pragmatic approaches complement each other, one dealing with structure and the other with function. In one widely accepted view, for any one speech event, specific codes count as appropriate while others are marked (Myers-Scotton 1993). CS is said to convey information by virtue of the fact that the markedness directly reflects societal values and ideologies. For example, "standard" speech varieties are said to convey authority because they are associated with official situations. But linguistic anthropologists criticize this approach on the grounds that it rests on a dichotomized view of structure and function that cannot account for situated understanding (Bourdieu 1991; Hanks 1995; Auer 1998). It is assumed that the signaling processes underlying interpretation involve both symbolic (i.e., denotational) and indexical signs, which communicate via conventionalized associations between sign and context (Lucy 1993; Silverstein 1993). In discourse, indexical signs function metapragmatically to evoke the mostly unverbalized contextual presuppositions on which assessments of communicative intent rest. CS functions as one of a class of indexical signs or contextualization cues (Gumperz 1992, 1996). Along with others of the same class (e.g., PROSODY AND INTONATION and rhythm), such signs are not lexically meaningful; they work by constructing the ground for situated interpretation. By way of example, consider the following exchange. A third grader, D, is having difficulty with the adjectival use of "surprising" in a workbook question about a story discussed in class: What surprising discovery does Molly make? His partner G makes several unsuccessful attempts to explain, but D remains unconvinced until G finally comes up with the paraphrase: "A discovery que era ["that was"] surprising discovery." Whereupon D finally produces the expression "surprising discovery" on his own. The switch here counts as an indexical cue that reframes the issue, so as to relate the new expression to what D already knows (Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz, and Szymanski 1998) .
When seen in the perspective of practice, then, CS does not convey propositional meaning nor does it directly convey societal attitudes: CS affects the situated interpretive process by enabling participants to project particular interpretations that are then confirmed or disconfirmed by what happens in subsequent speech. What distinguishes CS from other metapragmatic signs is that it is always highly ideologized, so that the sequential analysis of the interactive process by which interpretations are agreed upon can be a highly sensitive index, not solely of grammatical knowledge, but also of shared, culturally specific knowledge.
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Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology