This paper investigates the translation styles of court interpreters in New York City and the styles' social and pragmatic implications for multilingual interactions in court. Interpreters are found to vary between using first or third person to represent the voice of a translated source speaker, thereby varying between adherence to explicit institutional norms that require first person and accommodation to non-professional interpreting practices that favor the use of reported speech. In a quantitative and qualitative analysis, this variation is shown to be influenced by several pragmatic and social factors, and to index the interpreters' stances towards source speakers and towards the immigrant court users who are the recipients of translations from English. It is argued that translation styles have profound consequences for limited English speakers, as the insistence on institutional norms in translating to them is viewed as a gatekeeping behavior that may impede their full participation in the proceedings.

Awarding Institution: New York University, USA Date of Award: May 2006

Many studies have shown intersentential codeswitching to be related to conversational structure. In this paper, I argue that insertion can be explained in these terms as well. Drawing on Halliday's and Hasan's(1976) notion of cohesive tie, I claim that insertions are a consequence of the bilingual speaker's attempt to create coherence between utterances in different languages. By repeating a lexical item from a previous utterance even if the language of interaction has changed, a speaker establishes lexical cohesion between the two utterances. Interpreting insertion as the result of lexical cohesion serves to explain some crosslinguistic characteristics of insertion, namely the dominance of nouns(as lexical cohesion is basically restricted to open class items), and the asymmetry between the languages(as lexical choice is influenced by the context in which a lexical item is used and language choice is restricted in many contexts). Furthermore, the analysis eliminates the need to distinguish between loanwords, nonce-borrowings, Furthermore, the analysis eliminates the need to distinguishbetween loanwords, nonce-borrowings, or single-item codeswitches, as a lexical item is no longer defined in relationship to the lexicon of the language in whose context it occurs, but rather by the cohesive tie in which it participates.

A B S T R A C TThis article investigates the role of script choice in bilingual writing, drawing on classified advertisements and other texts written for and by Russianspeaking immigrants in New York City. The study focuses on English-origin items that appear in Russian texts, which are found to be written either in roman or Cyrillic script. Through an investigation of categorical and variable constraints on this variation, it is found that script choice relates to the distinction between lexical borrowing and single-item codeswitching. It is argued that writers may, consciously and on a token-by-token basis, choose the Cyrillic script to mark a word as borrowed or the roman script to mark it as foreign. However, they may also avoid this choice, as hybrid forms attest, especially when the use of characters shared by both alphabets allows ambiguous readings. The findings thus have implications for understanding notions of language boundaries in bilingual language use. (Writing systems, Russian, English, codeswitching, borrowing, hybridity.)*

The use of the nominative 1sg pronouns in co-ordinate NPs in object position, most famously between you and I, has received much attention from prescriptivists and formal linguists, but it has never been the object of a variationist study that compares its usage to that of other variants. This article seeks to fill the gap, based on a data set of co-ordinate NPs in object position, gathered through observation of everyday speech as well as in experimental sociolinguistic interviews. Arguing that the choice of NP case and of NP order is inseparably related, we identify three major patterns of co-ordinate NPs: Vernacular me and X and two post-Vernacular patterns, Standard X and me and Polite X and I. We then examine social and linguistic factors that constrain the usage of individual patterns. We conclude that all three patterns are robust and that they exist in stable ternary variation.The use of nominative pronouns in co-ordinate NPs in object position is relatively common in contemporary American English. It shows up, for example, in the worlds of politicians (1) and magazine editors (2), in erudite prose (3) and newspapers (4), on television (5), and in daily speech (6).(1) a. if you're tired of being heartbroken when you go home at night and you want a spring in your step and a song in your heart, you give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America back. (Bill Clinton, 1992, printed in the New York Times, July 23, 1992, quoted by Johannessen, 1998:15) b. in the interchanges between she and Chairman Fazio .