Language Alternation among Arabic and English Youth Bilinguals: Reflecting or Constructing Social Realities?  

Oleh:

Al-Khatib, Hayat

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Full Text) vol. 6 no. 6 (2003), page 409 — 422.
Topik: interpersonal; phonologic integratability; syntactic compatibility; rutromorphemic; syntagmatic choices
Fulltext: Vol. 6, No. 6, 409-422.pdf (197.21KB)

Isi artikel

The aim of this paper is to reect on bilingual performance and speci?cally language alternation in informal contexts. In this reection I have focused on the language choice of bilingual speakers when they are not restricted by the social factors of formal settings to adopt one code or the other. I have adopted Poplack’s framework in evaluating the traditional reective aspect of grammatical competence of three youth bilinguals as they used intrasentential, intersentential and the forbidden intromorphemic language alternation in two comparatively distinct languages. In addition to this, I have correlated the base matrix language of the utterances in the informal context, applying Myers-Scotton’s functional differentiation, with the macro-social inuences, reecting the bilinguals’ acclaimed communicative competence. As far as the reective approach goes, bilingual performance and speci?cally language alternation is viewed positively when the bilingual uses his or her two languages in a manner that conforms to the dictates of the macro-social situation, hence reecting his or her sociolinguistic competence. At the same time the bilingual speaker’s performance needs to demonstrate linguistic abilities by using language alternation only at speci?c intervals that do not interfere with the syntactic and morphological constraints of the languages involved, hence reecting his or her grammatical competence. Bilingual performance outside this reective framework is frowned upon as ‘motivated by an inability to carry out conversation in the language on the oor at the moment’ (Myers-Scotton, 1995: 48). My argument is that bilingual performance, and speci?cally language alternation, has primarily pragmatic and interpersonal considerations. In a bilingual performance that is not reective of the macro-social inuences of the situation of the utterance, the bilingual speaker intends to defy the expected performance to impart extralinguistic messages through language alternation at speci?c choice points of his or her utterance to impart new themes and construct new micro-situations.

Opini Anda

Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini!

Kembali