THE DYNAMICS OF LANGUAGE CONTACT IN AN ALGERIAN TCONTEXT: TOWARDS A PLURILINGUAL FFDFD The Dynamics of Language Contact in Communities of Practice: Towards a Plurilingual Approach of Language Processing in Algerian Context (original) (raw)

2013, OUAHMICHE GHANIA DOCTORAL THESIS

This research attempts to describe and analyze some linguistic practices among Algerian students resulting from contact between Oran Arabic and French. Indeed, this study is based mainly on a double orientation. The first approach appears to be descriptive/ analytic, and tries to apply the theoretical and empirical foundations of the insertional models proposed by Myers-Scotton on a corpus realized among university students recorded in different speech situations even if university remains the major context (formal setting). The second approach seems to be interpretive principally based on quantitative and qualitative methods in order to test the empirical validity and the explanatory power of Myers-Scotton’s insertional models. The main idea underlying this research seeks to establish a link between the asymmetry in the different patterns of Oran Arabic/French Code-Switching realized by bilingual students showing varying degrees of bilinguality, and the asymmetry with regard to the organization of the various system and content morphemes in the mental lexicon. Despite the structural explanations of the dueling languages permitting the alternation from French to Oran Arabic and vice versa, other factors appear to be influential in shaping of mixed constructions, namely the speakers’ competence in the languages involved in t the mixed constructions, the pragmatic intentions of the interlocutors when producing mixed constituents, embedded islands and internal islands as well as the speakers’ attitudes towards the languages involved in bilingual speech. In fact, this research is basically founded on a corpus of spontaneous conversations recorded among some Algerian bilingual/plurilingual students. The analysis of the students’ productions tries to demonstrate the directionality of code-switching in an Algerian context where the emplacement, the distribution and the status of the syntactic categories/structures were investigated when French and Oran Arabic have been shown as Matrix or Embedded Languages in the corpus. Unlike other researches on code-switching and mainly studies undertaken by Ziamari, which targeted the correlation of the specificities of code-switching Moroccan Arabic/ French to fact of urbanity, this research aims to demonstrate that the linguistic dynamism due to Oran Arab/French duality is the result of a particular practice that distinguishes a community of practice (that of bilingual students) from other linguistic communities. For this purpose, the context (university) as an urban structure cannot be the only trigger of code-switching if the pragmatic intentions of the interlocutors do not favor this linguistic act. The results obtained in this research showed that the insertion of French constructions in a morphosyntactic frame governed by OrA as a matrix language is characterized by a predominance of certain structures, namely noun phrase islands, mixed nominal constituents, and inflectional phrases. Also, the results showed an asymmetry in the roles assigned to languages involved in CS (Arabic and French Oran in this case). Oran Arabic appears as the matrix language in most mixed-codes whereas French’ role was limited to an embedded language despite the abundance of embedded structures from this language. The insertional models which constitute the theoretical framework of this research provide consistent elements of answers to many questions raised in this study. These models treating issues relevant to syntax and cognition indicate a flexibility of analysis and facilitate the understanding of complex linguistic phenomena generated by plurilingualism. Notwithstanding, other avenues of exploration appear to be completive to this research should target the application of the basic principles of Myers-Scotton’s models by adopting a didactic perspective where problems of the acquisition of French and English syntactic categories and larger constructions, error analysis, and problems of interference would be discussed.