Review of Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Catherine Travis. 2018. Bilingualism in the community. Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge University Press. (original) (raw)
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What quali es Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL as the most heavily cited paper in the 50-year history of Linguistics? It did inspire a substantial and productive research tradition, but it has also generated recurrent and ongoing attacks. I'd like to re ect on why its main proposals have been so controversial, and what their current status is today. A remarkable fact is that despite 33 years of intense research activity since Sometimes was published, there is still no consensus on the nature or identity of even the major manifestations of language contact (codeswitching [CS] and borrowing [B]), let alone the linguistic conditions governing their use. This discord, so characteristic of the eld of contact linguistics, arises not so much from the recalcitrance of its subject as from the incommensurable perspectives of its practitioners on language, the conduct of research, the nature of "fact" and evidence, and the principles of scienti c proof.
Linguistics, 1980
What qualifies Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL as the most heavily cited paper in the 50-year history of Linguistics? It did inspire a substantial and productive research tradition, but it has also generated recurrent and ongoing attacks. I'd like to reflect on why its main proposals have been so controversial, and what their current status is today. A remarkable fact is that despite 33 years of intense research activity since Sometimes was published, there is still no consensus on the nature or identity of even the major manifestations of language contact (codeswitching [CS] and borrowing [B]), let alone the linguistic conditions governing their use. This discord, so characteristic of the field of contact linguistics, arises not so much from the recalcitrance of its subject as from the incommensurable perspectives of its practitioners on language, the conduct of research, the nature of "fact" and evidence, and the principles of scientific proof.
Code-switching and bilinguals’ grammars
The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact, 2020
Does code-switching entail grammatical convergence or are speakers who regularly code-switch alternating between separate grammars? Underlying debates on codeswitching are the methodological issues of what counts as code-switching, as well as appropriate data and evaluation metrics that prioritize community norms over idiosyncratic instances and robust patterns over isolated cases. This chapter illustrates how bilingual behavior as observed in sociolinguistically constructed corpora of spontaneous speech provides replicable findings. Widely entertained mechanisms of contact-induced change are tested through measures of code-switching presence in comparisons with non-contact benchmarks, pivoted on quantitative diagnostics of grammatical similarity evinced in the linguistic conditioning of variation.
Bilingual verbs in three Spanish/English code-switching communities
International Journal of Bilingualism, 2020
Objectives/research questions: We investigate two understudied bilingual compound verbs that have been attested in Spanish/English code-switching; namely, ‘hacer + VInf’ and ‘estar + VProg’. Specifically, we examined speakers’ intuitions vis-à-vis the acceptability and preferentialuse of non-canonical and canonical hacer ‘to do’ or estar ‘to be’ bilingual constructions among bilinguals from Northern Belize, New Mexico and Puerto Rico. Methodology: Speakers from Northern Belize (n = 44), New Mexico (n = 32) and Puerto Rico (n = 30) completed a two-alternative forced-choice acceptability task and a language background questionnaire. Data and analysis: The data were examined using an analysis of variance and Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment. Conclusions: Whereas Northern Belizean bilinguals gave the highest ratings to ‘hacer + VInf’, both groups of US bilinguals gave preferential ratings to ‘estar + VProg’ bilingual constructions. On the other hand, Puerto Rican bilinguals gave the highest preferential ratings to the canonical estar bilingual compound verbs (i.e. estar + an English progressive verb) but rejected hacer bilingual compound verbs. While ‘hacer + VInf’ and ‘estar + VProg’ may represent variants that are available to Spanish/English bilinguals, the present findings suggest a community specific distribution, in which hacer bilingual compound verbs are consistently preferred over estar bilingual compound verbs in Northern Belize, whereas estar bilingual constructions are preferred among US bilinguals. Originality: This is the first cross-community examination of these bilingual compound verbs in Northern Belize (Central America/Caribbean), New Mexico (Southwest US) and Puerto Rico (US/Caribbean), three contexts in the Spanish-speaking world characterized by long-standing Spanish/English language contact and the use of bilingual language practices. Implications: Findings underscore the importance of bilingual language experience in modulating linguistic competence and the necessity to study code-switching from a language ecological perspective, as subtle context-specific patterns in code-switching varieties may be manifested not only in bilingual speakers’ oral production but in intuition as well. A more fine-grained understanding of speakers’ judgments is vital to experimental studies that seek to investigate code-switching grammars both within and across communities where code-switching varieties of the same language pair are spoken.
Bilingual constructions Reassessing the typology of code-switching
Studies of language contact have largely been based on analyses of contact effects, such as codeswitching or grammatical interference, in recordings of spontaneous in-group conversation among bilinguals. This also holds for the sizable body of research on the Turkish immigrant community in The Netherlands. However, with the growing acceptance of a usage-based approach as a basis for linguistic research, exclusively relying on this method has become a serious limitation, as various questions and issues become important that cannot be studied well with purely synchronic conversational data. In this paper, results are reported from two pilot studies with a wider range of research methods, including interviews, acceptability tasks and controlled elicitation. They allow conclusions about the degree to which various types of Dutch influence, such as loanwords, loan translations and grammatical features, have penetrated the Turkish as spoken in the immigrant setting. All in all, the extent of Dutch influence continues to be moderate, but there are signs that contact-induced change is accelerating in the third generation.
Hispania, 2017
o el mismo Lazarillo de Tormes" (229). Si bien podría argüirse que se trata solo de ejemplos, no deja de llamar la atención la exclusión de autores latinoamericanos en esta cita, así como en el resto del ensayo, a excepción de Mario Benedetti o Mariano Azuela. Pese a afirmar Sanz, más adelante, que "no solo se defiende el interés de los textos literarios en el aula de ELE, sino también su inclusión, entre esas obras, de textos de autores procedentes de Latinoamérica" (237), la práctica omisión de ejemplos de escritores latinoamericanos, frente a la amplia nómina de literatos españoles que se citan en el texto contrasta parcialmente con la complejidad y diversidad de la que, con mucho acierto, hablaba Ferrús. Una singularidad del libro es que hace patentes nuevas realidades que afectan a la práctica docente, como el perfil cada vez más heterogéneo de los estudiantes de ELE/EL2 en las universidades españolas, la creciente presencia de alumnado sinohablante y japonés, o el uso de las nuevas tecnologías (p. ej., aplicaciones móviles para la práctica de la pronunciación) y de las redes sociales en el aula. Todos estos aspectos-y muchos otros que se abordan en el volumen-nos permiten ser cada vez más conscientes, por un lado, de los cambios a los que nos enfrentamos como docentes de una lengua en expansión que no solo cuenta cada vez con un número mayor de hablantes nativos, sino también de aprendientes y, por otro, de la necesidad de abrir nuevas líneas de investigación que arrojen luz sobre los diferentes fenómenos a los que, desde la práctica docente, debemos dar respuesta. En todo caso, es de celebrar la publicación de obras como el presente volumen no solo por los valiosos datos que aportan al lector, sino también porque son un reflejo de que el nuestro es un campo multidisciplinar y en auge donde todavía quedan muchos caminos por explorar.