A Developmental Perspective on Codeswitching: Conversations Between a Pair of Bilingual Siblings

Abstract

This study addresses the broader question of social motivation for codeswitching (CS) as well as the more narrowly linguistic question of structural constraints, based on six recordings of conversations between a pair of bilingual siblings over a period of four years (ages 2;8 to 6;7 and 5;11 to 9;10). Unmarked CS, emblematic of the children's dual identity as members of an Estonian family and an English-speaking community, is found to characterize their interactions, with a shift from minimal intrasentential CS in the first recording (3%), which has a roughly even balance of English and Estonian turns for both siblings, to a mean of 12% CS in the conversations which are largely in Estonian. The linguistic constraints formulated in the Matrix Language Frame model are observed, on the whole; violations not found in adult CS, such as the inclusion of system morphemes from the embedded language with grammatical agreement in the matrix language, are also observed but are rare. The two children are found to differ in “CS style,” with the younger child allowing his two languages to interact more freely as regards switching of grammatical elements and of sequences of content words, and sometimes failing to inhibit switching in discourse with monolinguals.

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