Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching

ISBN-13: 9780198237129 / Angielski / Miękka / 1997 / 304 str.

Carol Myers-Scotton

Opis

The goal of this book, a companion volume to Social Motivations for Codeswitching (Oxford, 1993) is to describe and explain intrasentential codeswitching--the production of two or more languages within the same sentence. Most linguists who do not study codeswitching think of it as belonging strictly in the domain of sociolinguistics. Most codeswitching studies do indeed have a social aspect, because they typically use naturally occurring performance data as their base. This book, however, is just as much a study in grammatical theory as a study of language in use. The specific research question addressed is this: when speakers alternate between two or more linguistic varieties, how free is this alternation from the structural point of view? Carol Myers-Scotton develops a model of the morphosyntactic constraints on codeswitching and concludes that the principles governing codeswitching are the same everywhere.

Recenzje

clear and easy to read ... Myers-Scotton's work has developed into the dominant paradigm for present-day research in this field ... we wish to stress ... the importance of Myers-Scotton's work for the field ... It has linked psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and grammatical concerns and contains a number of valuable ideas that can lead to further hypotheses and a clearer view of how bilinguals function.