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A milestone study: Structured variability as the key to unraveling (contact-induced) language change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2011

RENA TORRES CACOULLOS
RENA TORRES CACOULLOS*
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, The Pennsylvania State Universityrena@psu.edu
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Extract

Despite increasing attention to bilingualism – conferences, publications, grants – linguists are as far as ever from reaching consensus. Is code-switching the alternation between two equally activated languages or is it the insertion of elements from a source language into a recipient language? Can and should we distinguish borrowing and code-switching of single words? Is there grammatical convergence between bilinguals’ two languages and does code-switching promote it? Since the first accounts of the structure of code-switching in the 1970s, the same questions have been readdressed with astoundingly little, if any, cumulative advances. Scientific progress has been obstructed by polemic debate, often fueled by elicited judgments, which may display random error (Labov, 1996), or reports of the behavior of stray individuals, which are uninterpretable in the absence of knowledge of the systematic community pattern (Labov, 2006/1966, p. 5).

Type
Peer Commentaries
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 233 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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