Lexical cohesion in multilingual conversation

Abstract

Many studies have shown intersentential codeswitching to be related to conversational structure. In this paper, I argue that insertion can be explained in these terms as well. Drawing on Halliday's and Hasan's(1976) notion of cohesive tie, I claim that insertions are a consequence of the bilingual speaker's attempt to create coherence between utterances in different languages. By repeating a lexical item from a previous utterance even if the language of interaction has changed, a speaker establishes lexical cohesion between the two utterances. Interpreting insertion as the result of lexical cohesion serves to explain some crosslinguistic characteristics of insertion, namely the dominance of nouns(as lexical cohesion is basically restricted to open class items), and the asymmetry between the languages(as lexical choice is influenced by the context in which a lexical item is used and language choice is restricted in many contexts). Furthermore, the analysis eliminates the need to distinguish between loanwords, nonce-borrowings, Furthermore, the analysis eliminates the need to distinguishbetween loanwords, nonce-borrowings, or single-item codeswitches, as a lexical item is no longer defined in relationship to the lexicon of the language in whose context it occurs, but rather by the cohesive tie in which it participates.

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