SPAN 597 Code-switching

This seminar will provide an examination of codeswitching (CS), drawing on corpus- and lab-based methods. We will attend to bilinguals' linguistic experience and community norms as impacting the cognitive representation of language and thus linguistic structure. We will address (1) linguistic concerns with constraints on CS by asking: Is CS favored at particular syntactic and prosodic junctures of the two languages? and (2) psycholinguistic concerns with the facilitation of CS by asking: Is CS predicted by "triggering" (either situational, e.g., by the interlocutor, or linguistic, e.g. by cognates)? Rather than assume that bilingual patterns need be derivable from syntactic principles for monolingual grammar, our goal will be to identify bilingual CS strategies—quantitative preferences to switch at particular sites and structural adjustments for switching at dispreferred sites. Students will present and evaluate published articles; learn to extract and code data from spontaneously produced CS; and conduct a pilot study toward an original research proposal.