Pieter Muysken

Language Contact and Bilingualism

What happens - sociologically, linguistically, educationally, politically - when more than one language is in regular use in a community? How do speakers handle these languages simultaneously, and what influence does this language contact have on the languages involved? Although most people in the world use more than one language in everyday life, the approach to the study of language has usually been that monolingualism is the norm. The recent interest in bilingualism and language contact has led to a number of new approaches, based on research in communities in many different parts of the world. This book draws together this diverse research, looking at examples from many different situations, to present the topic in any easily accessible form. Language contact is looked at from four distinct perspectives. The authors consider bilingual societies; bilingual speakers; language use in the bilingual community; finally language itself (do languages change when in contact with each other? Can they borrow rules of grammar, or just words? How can new languages emerge from language contact?). The result is a clear, concise synthesis offering a much needed overview of this lively area of language study.

One Speaker, Two Languages. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching.

1. Introduction Lesley Milroy and Pieter Muysken Part I. Code-Switching in Institutional and Community Settings: 2. Bilingual speech of migrant people Louise Dabene and Daniele Moore 3. Code-switching in the context of dialect/standard language relations Anna Giacolone-Ramat 4. Code-switching in community, regional and national repertoires Penelope Gardner-Chloros 5. Code-switching in the classroom Marilyn Martin-Jones Part II. Code-Switching and Social Life: 6. The pragmatics of code-switching Peter Auer 7. A social network approach to code-switching Lesley Milroy and Li Wei 8. Code-switching and the politics of language Monica Heller Part III. Grammatical Constraints on Code-Switching: 9. Code-switching and grammatical theory Pieter Muysken 10. Patterns of language mixture Shana Poplack and Marjory Meechan 11. A lexically based production model of code-switching Carol Myers-Scotton Part IV. Code-Switching in Bilingual Development and Processing: 12. A psycholinguistic approach to code-switching Francois Grosjean 13. Code-switching in bilingual first language acquisition Regina Koppe and Jurgen M. Meisel 14. The code-switching behaviour of adults with language disorders Kenneth Hyltenstam Conclusion 15. Code-switching research as a theoretical challenge Andree Tabouret-Keller.

Government and code-mixing

The aim of this paper is to argue that the process of code-mixing is constrained by the government relation that holds between the constituents of a sentence. The government constraint replaces a number of specific constraints that have been proposed in the literature to account for apparently ‘impossible’, ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘non-occurring’ types of intra-sentential switches. Code-mixing is a form of linguistic behaviour which produces utterances consisting of elements taken from the lexicons of different languages. Some examples are given in (1).

The UG paradox in L2 acquisition

There is a considerable amount of recent evidence that stable principles of Universal Grammar (UG) are available to adult second language (L2) learners in structuring their intuitions about the target language grammar. In contrast, however, there is also evidence from the acquisition of word order, agreement and negation in German that there are substantial differences between first language (L1) and L2 learners. In our view, these differences are due to UG principles guiding L1, but not L2 acquisition. We will show that alternative ways of accounting for the L1/L2 differences are not successful. Finally we will deal with the question of how our view can be reconciled with the idea that L2 learners can use UG principles to some extent in the evaluation of target sentences.

Code-switching and grammatical theory

In the last fifteen years, a large number of studies have appeared in which specific cases of intra-sentential code-switching were analysed from a grammatical perspective, involving a variety of language pairs, social settings and speaker types. It was found that code-switching is a quite normal and widespread form of bilingual interaction, requiring a great deal of bilingual competence. In individual cases, intra-sentential code-switching is not distributed randomly in the sentence, but rather it occurs at specific points. Where much less agreement was reached is with respect to general properties of the process. Various ‘constraints’ and ‘models’ regulating intra-sentential code-switching (the type most interesting from the grammatical perspective) have been proposed and tested, with the result that some cases appear to fall under one constraint, and others under another. This is by itself unsatisfactory. We do not know in any systematic way how different the models proposed are, neither intrinsically nor in their predictions. It should be mentioned at this point that many of the studies do not make the constraints or models very explicit, limiting themselves to descriptive statements. Therefore, an account is needed of the grammatical notions relevant to code-switching. These notions can then be used both to characterise specific instances of intra-sentential switching and to relate the various proposals in the literature to each other.

Research techniques for the study of code-switching

The aim of this chapter is to provide researchers with a tool kit of semi-experimental and experimental techniques for studying code-switching. It presents an overview of the current off-line and on-line research techniques, ranging from analyses of published bilingual texts of spontaneous conversations, to tightly controlled experiments. A multi-task approach used for studying code-switched sentence production in Papiamento-Dutch bilinguals is also exemplified

One speaker, two languages: Introduction: code-switching and bilingualism research

The contemporary setting of bilingualism studies In the last forty years or so, developments such as the expansion of educational provision to many more levels of society, massive population shifts through migration, and technological advances in mass communication have served to accentuate our sense of a visibly and audibly multilingual modern world. Other large-scale social changes have combined to lead to a considerable increase in bilingualism, not only as a European but as a world-wide phenomenon. First, modernisation and globalisation have stimulated the expansion in numbers of people speaking national languages located within relatively limited boundaries alongside international languages such as English, French and Spanish. As a consequence of centuries of colonisation, these have spread far beyond their original territories, and there is every sign that their spread as second or auxiliary languages for large numbers of speakers is continuing. Indeed, they are being joined by other languages of economically powerful nations, such as Japanese and Arabic. Furthermore, new multilingual nations have emerged in the years since the Second World War, where linguistic minorities are increasingly becoming bilingual, not only in the language of their own social group and the national language, but often additionally in one of these international languages. A second development leading to increasing bilingualism is the relatively recent phenomenon of large-scale language revival. There are many nation states in Europe – Switzerland and Belgium are well-known examples – where bilingualism is institutionalised and historically deep-rooted.

Language contact outcomes as the result of bilingual optimization strategies

This paper sketches a comprehensive framework for modeling and interpreting language contact phenomena, with speakers’ bilingual strategies in specific scenarios of language contact as its point of departure. Bilingual strategies are conditioned by social factors, processing constraints of speakers’ bilingual competence, and perceived language distance. In a number of domains of language contact studies important progress has been made, including Creole studies, code-switching, language development, linguistic borrowing, and areal convergence. Less attention has been paid to the links between these fields, so that results in one domain can be compared with those in another. These links are approached here from the perspective of speaker optimization strategies. Four strategies are proposed: maximize structural coherence of the first language (L1); maximize structural coherence of the second language (L2); match between L1 and L2 patterns where possible; and rely on universal principles of language processing. These strategies can be invoked to explain outcomes of language contact. Different outcomes correspond to different interactions of these strategies in bilingual speakers and their communities.

Structured variation in codeswitching: towards an empirically based typology of bilingual speech patterns

This paper aims to accomplish two things: first, to develop precise criteria to establish profiles for bilingual speech, following the typology of insertion, alternation and congruent lexicalisation developed in Muysken (2000); and second, to test these criteria on specific data sets. A first set involves Welsh–English bilingual data analysed by Deuchar, a second set comprises Tsou–Mandarin Chinese data collected and analysed by Sung-Lan Wang, and a third set involves Taiwanese–Mandarin Chinese data, also collected and analysed by Sung-Lan Wang. We conclude that it is indeed possible to establish more precise quantitative profiles which capture the intuition that different data sets show different codeswitching properties, but that there are a number of conceptual and methodological issues that require further investigation.

How adult second language learning differs from child first language development

Response to a target article by Samuel David Epstein, Suzanne Flynn, Gita Martohardjono: Second language acquisition: theoretical and experimental issues in contemporary research