Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing

Abstract

Bilingual Speech places the study of codemixing squarely within the larger disciplinary contexts of grammatical theory and language contact and variation. The inquiry parts from the premise that codemixing research cannot proceed uninformed of a properly structural analysis. Indeed, as author Pieter Muysken had himself affirmed some years previously, to understand which cases [of codemixing] are of the same type, and which are different, to see which patterns are exceptional or marked and which are not, to be able to do quantitative research, for all this we need to know what the structural features of the patterns are (1995, p.178) Towards that end, in this book project, Muysken endeavors to discover “how bilingual speakers combine elements from their two languages when processing mixed sentences” (p. 1), so doing by bringing the tools and concepts of generative grammar to bear on the reanalysis of individual examples from a wealth of existing bilingual corpora. The result of this comparative study is the identification of three fundamental and distinct typologies of codemixing: insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalization, the selection among them in a particular bilingual setting determined by the grammatical properties of the languages

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