Carol Myers-Scotton has edited a collection of essays that covers the choice of one style of English over another in everything from Bible translations to "surprise in poetry" to supervisor-worker interactions on the automobile assembly line. An important theme developed to varying degrees in these papers is the notion that speakers and writers, as rational actors, exploit the unmarked-marked opposition regarding audience expectations so as to convey messages of intentionality charged with social or psychological import.

This collection of essays considers how messages of intentionality are conveyed by choosing one style of English over another. While these choices are not necessarily conscious, implicit in the communicative competence of a speaker, performer, or writer is an awareness of the consequences of their choice of linguistic code. Messages of intentionality thus go beyond the referential content of the conversational turn, performance, or literary work. Intentions refer to everything from attitudes toward the subject matter to the presentation of the speakers persona in relation to the topic or...

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...

This study focuses on the social motivations for codeswitching, that is, the use of two or more linguistic varieties in the same conversation. Using data from multilingual African contexts (mostly from conversations studied in Kenya), Carol Myers-Scotton advances a theoretical argument which aims at a general explanation of these motivations. She treats codeswitching as a type of skilled performance, not as the "alternative strategy" of a person who cannot carry on a conversation in the language in which it began. When engaging in codeswitching, speakers exploit the socio-psychological values...

Multiple Voices: An Introduction to Bilingualism provides a comprehensive overview of all major features of bilingualism, including grammatical, cognitive, and social aspects.

• examines bilingualism as a socio-political phenomenon and emphasizes languages in contact, language maintenance and shift, language policy, and bilingual education
  
• includes many detailed examples from all over the world
  
• written accessibly for students with little or no background in linguistics by a prominent bilingualism researcher

Multiple Voices: An Introduction to Bilingualism provides a comprehensive overview of all major features of bilingualism, including grammatical, cognitive, and social aspects.

• examines bilingualism as a socio-political phenomenon and emphasizes languages in contact, language maintenance and shift, language policy, and bilingual education
  
• includes many detailed examples from all over the world
  
• written accessibly for students with little or no background in linguistics by a prominent bilingualism researcher

Contact Linguistics is a critical investigation of what happens to the grammars of languages when bilingual speakers use both their languages in the same clause. It consolidates earlier insights and presents the new theoretical and empirical work of a scholar whose ideas have had a fundamental impact on the field. It also shows that bilingual data offer a revealing window on the structure of the language faculty. Carol Myers-Scotton examines the nature of major contact phenomena, especially lexical borrowing, grammatical convergence, codeswitching, first language attrition, mixed languages,...