Spanish English Codeswitching In A Written Corpus

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.

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.

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 study tries to establish the systematicity of code-switching as shown in a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the linguistic behavior of twelve Spanish-English bilingual speakers of Mexican descent, drawn from the “Spanish in Texas Corpus” (Bullock and Toribio 2013). Results show that the frequency and typology of code-switching varied substantially among these speakers, concurring with previous research that has characterized U.S. Latinos as a highly diverse group in social interactions (Valdés 2001; Carreira 2004; Potowski 2010; Montrul 2013; Fairclough 2016, among others) and use of linguistic forms (Silva-Corvalán 1993; Zentella 1997; Valdés 2001; Colombi 2009). Moreover, some researchers have indicated that personality might also influence the code-switching behavior of U.S. Latinos (Gardner-Chloros 2008; Dewaele and Wei 2014). These findings also reveal that code-switching is not a random process, but rather a rule-governed linguistic phenomenon. In agreement with previous research (e.g. Poplack 1980; McClure 1981; Valdés 1982; Zentella 1997; Muysken 2000; Toribio 2002), the findings in this study indicate that code-switching preserves the structure of both languages and is usually utilized by bilinguals who are highly competent in both codes.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Romance Studies - Spanish Studies, grade: 1,7, University of Leipzig (Institut für Romanistik), language: English, abstract: “No creo ni en el latín ni en el bilingüismo. El latín es una lengua muerta. El bilingüismo, dos lenguas muertas.” (cf. Lipski 2008:41) Such was the opinion of Salvador Tió, the Puerto Rican journalist who is originally said to have coined the term Spanglish; a term, which since its inception, has been used to describe a multitude of linguistic phenomena, for the most part carrying with it a somewhat negative association. Nowadays, however, it has become synonymous with the much studied linguistic phenomenon known as code switching. Ironically, it is precisely this style of bilingual communication in the case of Spanish and English that Tió found so undesirable, and which today, seems to have evolved into a positive means of expressing one's own identity within a number of Spanish-English bilingual communities. I will discuss that particular topic in greater detail in chapter 3 of the paper. Firstly, it is necessary to define what is meant by code switching, and how that differs in comparison to other linguistic phenomena such as lexical borrowing, loan translations or loan words. Secondly, it is my aim to concentrate on what I, and many others, consider to be the three most prevalent grammatical and lexical theories pertaining to code switching at present; The Free Morpheme Constraint, The Equivalence Constraint and The Matrix Language Frame Model. There are many theories in existence and as Cantone (2007:53) mentions in her study of code switching in bilingual children; it continues to be a contentious subject among linguists: Most of the proposed constraints have been widely debated in the last 25 years, ending up in ruling out almost all proposals. It is nonetheless important to introduce them, since they are crucial for the discussion of the empirical data, and also because they show how code-switching can be analysed from a grammatical perspective. Finally, I wish to specifically address the term Spanglish, its different varieties and what can be incorporated under this definition nowadays. In summary of this chapter I will illustrate the use of Spanglish, that is to say Spanish-English code switching, by way of a current example: the bilingual population of Gibraltar.

Spanish-English code-switching is a prevalent and significant form of communication in bilingual and bicultural communities. Authors who wish to reflect and validate cultural and linguistic diversity in their written works may incorporate code-switching in their texts. The purpose of this study is to explore the growing trend of the inclusion of the Spanish language in English-based books written for children in the United States. In order to better understand how code-switching is utilized by authors of varying Spanish language proficiency, fourteen non-native Spanish speakers were surveyed and seventeen examples of their children's books that include Spanish-English code-switching were analyzed in regards to the type of code-switching present and the ways in which Spanish words were made accessible to the reader . Several patterns emerged through the exploration of these seventeen books. While all authors surveyed used a variety of ways to incorporate and define the Spanish language in their English-based texts, evidence suggests that those authors with more advanced language capabilities tended to do so in a more complex and integrated way through the use of varied grammatical entries and the addition of code-switched sentences and phrases. Nevertheless, overall the majority of code-switches from English to Spanish were isolated nouns, many of which were familiar words or cognates that have become a part of the vernacular in the United States. Loan words and borrowings that have made their way into the English language also accounted for a significant portion of the Spanish included in the books of this corpus. The analysis also revealed some examples of overgeneralizations of Spanish-speaking communities despite the variety of themes and Spanish vocabulary that were present in the selected books. To illustrate the point: in the seventeen books studied, there was a frequent appearance of desert-themed settings and characters of Mexican descent, two common features of the books in this study which do not reflect the geographical and ethnic diversity of Spanish-speaking communities neither in the United States nor around the world.