Homework -- Codeswitching, Language Change in Progress

NOTE: For this assignment you have a choice of which part to do. You can do any one of parts I, II, or III.

Consider the following examples of Spanish-English code-switching (from a study by Bayley and Zapata, 1993), and then answer questions A,B, and C below. Spanish portions of the text are indicated in italics, with a translation given in brackets in the line below.

1. This is tomorrow morning a las siete-veinte for the things you need to know.

[at the seven-twenty]

2. KXTN one-o-seven FM, aqui con Doctor Rex waking you up en la mañana.

[here with] [in the morning]

3. Traffic is moving steady sobre Four-Ten, entre el airport a Perrin Beitel.

[on] [from the] [to]

4. Y luego que una little girl le dice algo a mi sister…

[And later that (='as soon as') a] [to-her said something to my]

5. There's already an accidente reported.

[accident]

A. Poplack's 'surface equivalence constraint' on code-switching claims that code-switches can only occur at points in a sentence where the word order (and syntactic structure) would be the same in both languages, so that the resulting construction would be grammatical in either language if no switch had occurred. So for example, since Spanish and English both allow sentence subjects to occur before the verb, a sentence like 'Los niños llegaron = The boys arrived' could occur as "Los niños arrived" or "The boys llegaron", because all of these preserve the same subject-verb sequence. Do the code-switches in examples 1-5 follow the surface equivalence constraint, as far as you can tell? [If you don't know any Spanish, comment on whether the code-switched constructions are grammatical in English.] Explain.

B. Are there any points in any of these sentences where Poplack would predict that no switch could occur (because Spanish and English have different syntactic structures and word orders?) [If you don’t know anything about Spanish, you can rely on the translations as an indication of literal Spanish word order.]

C. Discuss the possible motivations that speakers may have had for doing these code-switches.

If you are able to understand a language other than English and can observe bilingual speakers code-switching, or participate yourself in code-switching conversations, collect examples of code-switches from yourself or people that you talk or listen to. Write them down as accurately as possible. Preferably, you should do this immediately, because as time passes, your memory of the words will become less and less accurate. Then, examine the examples that you have collected and discuss whether they follow the surface equivalence constraint.

Collect observations of English speakers using the phrase 'be like' as a quotative, meaning 'say' or 'said' (e.g. And he's like "Where are you?" and I'm like "On my way") Write down any cases that you hear people using, and make a note of the speaker's approximate age (according to these broad categories: teenager, 20s, 30s, 40 and over.) Don't do all your listening with speakers in just one age-group! Be sure to spend at least an hour listening to speakers over the age of 40.

Discuss the ages of the speakers who use this construction. Do they fall into a particular age-range? Do your results suggest that this form is a innovation in English, possibly a change in progress?