Spanish/English Codeswitching in a Written Corpus

Abstract

Spanish/English codeswitching in published work represents a claim to the right to participate in the marketplace on a bilingual and not just monolingual basis. This book offers a syntactic and sociolinguistic analysis of the codeswitching in a corpus of thirty texts: novels and short stories published in the United States by twenty-four authors between 1970-2000. An application of the Matrix Language Frame model shows that written codeswitching follows for the most part the same syntactic patterns as its spoken counterpart. The reasons why some written codeswitching is considered to be artificial or inauthentic are examined. An overview of written codeswitching research is given, including titles of many texts in addition to the corpus that contain codeswitching between diverse languages. The book concludes with a look at how codeswitching is used by writers to attain their objectives, and what the implications may be for the relative positions of Spanish, English, and Spanish/English codeswitching in the United States.

Exploring the dynamics of English/Spanish codeswitching in a written corpus

“…Table 3). More recently, Callahan (2004), Jonsson (2010) and Montes-Alcalá (2016) have proved that literary CS is used for a variety of socio-pragmatic and stylistic purposes similar to those found in bilingual speech. All of them propose a number of categories to suit their data; in particular, Montes-Alcalá (2016), following previous classifications, specifically tried to group related functions under the same category, both for clarity and economy's sake.…”

“…It is only relatively recently that some scholars have shown an interest in analyzing written CS (Sebba, 2000;Callahan, 2004;Montes-Alcalá, 2005a, 2005bSebba, Mahootian and Jonsson, 2012;Müller, 2015) or even contrasting the two modes, speech and writing (Lipski, 1982;Montes-Alcalá, 2000a, 2000b). Thus, Callahan (2004) proves that written CS follows for the most part the same syntactic patterns as its spoken counterpart. She offers an overview of written CS research, and concurs with other scholars (Keller, 1984;Kanellos, 2003) that CS is used by writers to achieve their aims.…”

“…It has actually been widely studied from different perspectives by an array of scholars who have shown that bilinguals tend to codeswitch for a variety of social and discursive factors (cf. Poplack, 1980;Lipski 1982Lipski , 2005Appel and Muysken, 1987;Heller, 1988Heller, , 1992Gardner-Chloros, 1991;Eastman, 1992;Myers-Scotton, 1993;Milroy and Muysken, 1995;Tabouret-Keller, 1997;Zentella, 1997;Auer, 1998;Jacobson, 1998Jacobson, , 2001Poplack and Meechan, 1998;Moyer, 1998;Montes-Alcalá, 2000a, 2000b, 2005a2005b;Callahan, 2004). As Gardner-Chloros (2015) put it, "Code-switching is infinitely more than just throwing in a word from your other language.…”

Languages in contact, cultures in conflict: English and Spanish in the USA

“…As Moro and Cortabarría show in this special issue, code-switching defines many linguistic situations in the USA. Code-switching, or 'the use of words and structures from more than one language or linguistic variety by the same speaker within the same speech situation, conversation or utterance' (Callahan, 2004, p. 5), has become such a common feature of English/Spanish contact in the USA that it is both the object of academic research (see, for example, Callahan, 2004) and the topic of popular culture (as, for example, movies such as Spanglish, and television sitcoms like Modern Family). The term Spanglish has often been used in connection with this linguistic variety, sometimes with a positive bias by activists that consider it an affirmation of their identity (Lipski, 2008, pp.…”

“…Callahan (2004), an anglophone researcher who has delved into the features of code-switching, acknowledges that she began switching between the two languages as she became more fluent in Spanish:…”