This article covered code switching and the various constraints and theories that have been posited to describe and explain how it functions. I thought it was very interesting since I have heard people code-switch and though I didn’t think it was random, I had never looked into what rules do govern it. In the article they mention the study of English learners of L2 Spanish and their ability to imitate a code-switched sentence and only the advanced learners seemed to have begun to acquire the rules for CM/CS. They also made a comment earlier about how language teachers particularly discourage CM. I remember one of the papers we read before mention that allowing students to mix words from their native language into utterances in the target language hindered acquisition of that language. But this is not really code-switching, as this experiment showed, because early learners aren’t yet able to form grammatical CM/CS sentences. In that case, is is wrong for a language teacher to discourage students from using native words/phrases, since at that stage it is not true code-switching? Or does it not matter if students use a few native words while learning their L2 because as long as they study and practice they will eventually acquire the target language, and the ability to code-switch grammatically, anyway?
This article on code switching (CS) and code mixing (CM) explained some of the constraints governing these two processes. The article goes into different models that aim to clarify the nature of these constraints and to show how the two grammars interact with one another. Even though just briefly, the article discussed the different between CM/CS and other mixed language systems, like pidgins and creoles. It seems in each of those, the “hierarchy” of languages is more imbalanced than in CM/CS. Speakers of creole, which develop from pidgins, experience a different “evolutionary and developmental phase” than bilingual speakers engaging in CM/CS: the mixing of two languages in creoles either tends toward the dominant language or the non dominant as they develop; languages of code mixers and code switchers, however, should maintain the same status. I think this concept of a hierarchy of languages is interesting on both the cognitive and the social, or sociopsychological level. The article discusses the sociopsychological factors involved in CM/CS, showing how code mixers and code switchers move between their two languages for social or practical purposes, and noting that “…very often bilinguals organize their two languages according to their public versus their private world. The public language often serves as the ‘they’ code and the private language as the ‘we’ code.” So more than just a cognitive balance act, this article shows that CM/CS require a certain social sensibility to navigate different situations using their two languages.
Code switching and code mixing are very familiar to me. This is because in my home university, there are many returnees from foreign countries and most of them speak both Japanese and English fluently, so they often use CM and CS in their usual conversation. It is understandable that CM and CS are convenient if everyone in the conversation can understand both languages because they can convey the nuance in the language without translation. However, some people tend to think their ways of using language
not intelligent. I think the discussion about CM and CS is strongly related to social factors and language ideologies.
Very interesting and broad subject! I didn’t know before about CM and CS. After I read the article I realized that yes, we as bilinguals, do use a lot of CM in mixing 2 languages and that is as this research have analyzed motivated by social and psychological factors. First I would agree with Gumperi’s view that CM CS is not a totally random phenomenon, the motivation for and hence restrictions on CM CS in general seem to be “stylistic and metaphorical rather than grammatical.†But going through the studies it shows that it’s grammatical, in some different aspects of two languages. But then as the study shows mixed speech data fails to take into account the semantic equivalence and monolingual is subjected to the substitution of a lexical item from a second language mixed sentence is subject to grammatical judgment without giving serious thought to the semantics of the mixed output!
I think CM/CS is a very interesting, and somehow inevitable, phenomenon in second language acquisition. As mentioned in the article, CM/CS is related much to sociolinguistics. I’ve found it interesting that as one society becomes bilingual/multilingual, this phenomenon occurs. For example, in Singapore, for centuries the lingua franca have been English and Hokkien – Malay and Hindi are also widely used in addition. The result is Singlish, where, speakers exploit the marking of the the pragmatic force of a sentence by adding particles such as “la”. Another example that I have seen is in the Philippines, where the population is native speakers of Tagalog but almost everyone also speaks English but they use CM/CS extensively, especially by randomly adding English words in their Tagalog sentences. In Indonesia, the lingua france is still Indonesian, however, as more and more people are becoming English speakers, I have seen a growing trend of CM/CS among Indonesians over the years. I have to say that I am also a “victim” of CM/CS, where I sometimes mix words from English, Japanese and Indonesian in one sentence when I speak with a friend who speaks the same languages. It is very interesting to me that some words pop up faster in a different language than the one I want to use.
This article discussed Code Mixing and Code Switching.I found the concept of CM/CS to be very interesting. I have had experience with it myself. I have several aunts who are German by birth and who have raised true bilingual children. They have elaborate conversations, mixing words and phrases from both German and English.
Mixing the L1 and L2 is something that I as a language teacher have been taught to discourage. We are taught to use he students’ L1 in the classroom as little as possible, focusing all of our efforts on getting them to speak the target language.
This was a really informative article. It discussed Code mixing (CM), which was the alternation of the bilinguals two languages within the same sentence, and Code switching (CS), which is the alteration between sentences. This was interesting because I often hear my roommate who is a bilingual in Portuguese and English switching between the two languages when she is talking to her mum on the phone. I’ve always wondered if there was a pattern behind when she can switch languages or if she could just switch at any point and it would just make sense since they both know both languages.
This article sort of answered my question because it states that there is a matrix language which is the language that gives the sentence its basic character, it is the language of inflection in the government and binding framework, and the language that the speaker is most fluent in. Then there is the embedded language which is the languages that contributes the “imported” material. So there are rules of what can be switched or mixed in languages.
This article examined the use of code switching and code mixing in bilinguals. It talks about the further extension of language intermixing in Pidgin and Creole languages as well as diglossia. In my language education classes I had asked the difference between a Creole and an official language and my professor suggested that the only difference is political and that the lower class and more oppressed people’s language would be considered a creole and not an official language. This paper however says that a pidgin becomes creole when it is the first language spoken by a new generation and that creole only becomes its own language with the death of the use of the higher prestige language the creole was born from. I wonder if this is the case why languages like Catalan are not considered creoles as Spanish is still widely spoken in Catalonia. Its very interesting reading about the varying degrees of language mixing in this paper and I would like to learn more about this subject and its application in bilingual students and bilingual education specifically.
It seems the definition of CM and CS vary depending on the context of the research. Here CM refers to intrasentential while CS refers to intersentential. The reality that I observed living in Quebec and other multilingual environments is that CM and CS occur concurrently. The Myers-Scotton MLF model lies on the assumption that there is always a Matrix Language (ML) and an Embedded Language (EL). To the extent that this is often true, MacSwan argues that the CM/CS model does not adequately describe the grammar of this system and does not fit within Chomsky’s Minimalist program. The constraints on this system outlined in the paper are particularly interesting in the sense that they seek to account for some of the features of bilingual grammar. THe authors’ description of speaker intent and the discourse pragmatics aspect of CM/CS is very fascinating as it is analyzed in speech communities in a variety of cultural contexts.
This article covered code switching and the various constraints and theories that have been posited to describe and explain how it functions. I thought it was very interesting since I have heard people code-switch and though I didn’t think it was random, I had never looked into what rules do govern it. In the article they mention the study of English learners of L2 Spanish and their ability to imitate a code-switched sentence and only the advanced learners seemed to have begun to acquire the rules for CM/CS. They also made a comment earlier about how language teachers particularly discourage CM. I remember one of the papers we read before mention that allowing students to mix words from their native language into utterances in the target language hindered acquisition of that language. But this is not really code-switching, as this experiment showed, because early learners aren’t yet able to form grammatical CM/CS sentences. In that case, is is wrong for a language teacher to discourage students from using native words/phrases, since at that stage it is not true code-switching? Or does it not matter if students use a few native words while learning their L2 because as long as they study and practice they will eventually acquire the target language, and the ability to code-switch grammatically, anyway?
This article on code switching (CS) and code mixing (CM) explained some of the constraints governing these two processes. The article goes into different models that aim to clarify the nature of these constraints and to show how the two grammars interact with one another. Even though just briefly, the article discussed the different between CM/CS and other mixed language systems, like pidgins and creoles. It seems in each of those, the “hierarchy” of languages is more imbalanced than in CM/CS. Speakers of creole, which develop from pidgins, experience a different “evolutionary and developmental phase” than bilingual speakers engaging in CM/CS: the mixing of two languages in creoles either tends toward the dominant language or the non dominant as they develop; languages of code mixers and code switchers, however, should maintain the same status. I think this concept of a hierarchy of languages is interesting on both the cognitive and the social, or sociopsychological level. The article discusses the sociopsychological factors involved in CM/CS, showing how code mixers and code switchers move between their two languages for social or practical purposes, and noting that “…very often bilinguals organize their two languages according to their public versus their private world. The public language often serves as the ‘they’ code and the private language as the ‘we’ code.” So more than just a cognitive balance act, this article shows that CM/CS require a certain social sensibility to navigate different situations using their two languages.
Code switching and code mixing are very familiar to me. This is because in my home university, there are many returnees from foreign countries and most of them speak both Japanese and English fluently, so they often use CM and CS in their usual conversation. It is understandable that CM and CS are convenient if everyone in the conversation can understand both languages because they can convey the nuance in the language without translation. However, some people tend to think their ways of using language
not intelligent. I think the discussion about CM and CS is strongly related to social factors and language ideologies.
Very interesting and broad subject! I didn’t know before about CM and CS. After I read the article I realized that yes, we as bilinguals, do use a lot of CM in mixing 2 languages and that is as this research have analyzed motivated by social and psychological factors. First I would agree with Gumperi’s view that CM CS is not a totally random phenomenon, the motivation for and hence restrictions on CM CS in general seem to be “stylistic and metaphorical rather than grammatical.†But going through the studies it shows that it’s grammatical, in some different aspects of two languages. But then as the study shows mixed speech data fails to take into account the semantic equivalence and monolingual is subjected to the substitution of a lexical item from a second language mixed sentence is subject to grammatical judgment without giving serious thought to the semantics of the mixed output!
I think CM/CS is a very interesting, and somehow inevitable, phenomenon in second language acquisition. As mentioned in the article, CM/CS is related much to sociolinguistics. I’ve found it interesting that as one society becomes bilingual/multilingual, this phenomenon occurs. For example, in Singapore, for centuries the lingua franca have been English and Hokkien – Malay and Hindi are also widely used in addition. The result is Singlish, where, speakers exploit the marking of the the pragmatic force of a sentence by adding particles such as “la”. Another example that I have seen is in the Philippines, where the population is native speakers of Tagalog but almost everyone also speaks English but they use CM/CS extensively, especially by randomly adding English words in their Tagalog sentences. In Indonesia, the lingua france is still Indonesian, however, as more and more people are becoming English speakers, I have seen a growing trend of CM/CS among Indonesians over the years. I have to say that I am also a “victim” of CM/CS, where I sometimes mix words from English, Japanese and Indonesian in one sentence when I speak with a friend who speaks the same languages. It is very interesting to me that some words pop up faster in a different language than the one I want to use.
This article discussed Code Mixing and Code Switching.I found the concept of CM/CS to be very interesting. I have had experience with it myself. I have several aunts who are German by birth and who have raised true bilingual children. They have elaborate conversations, mixing words and phrases from both German and English.
Mixing the L1 and L2 is something that I as a language teacher have been taught to discourage. We are taught to use he students’ L1 in the classroom as little as possible, focusing all of our efforts on getting them to speak the target language.
This was a really informative article. It discussed Code mixing (CM), which was the alternation of the bilinguals two languages within the same sentence, and Code switching (CS), which is the alteration between sentences. This was interesting because I often hear my roommate who is a bilingual in Portuguese and English switching between the two languages when she is talking to her mum on the phone. I’ve always wondered if there was a pattern behind when she can switch languages or if she could just switch at any point and it would just make sense since they both know both languages.
This article sort of answered my question because it states that there is a matrix language which is the language that gives the sentence its basic character, it is the language of inflection in the government and binding framework, and the language that the speaker is most fluent in. Then there is the embedded language which is the languages that contributes the “imported” material. So there are rules of what can be switched or mixed in languages.
This article examined the use of code switching and code mixing in bilinguals. It talks about the further extension of language intermixing in Pidgin and Creole languages as well as diglossia. In my language education classes I had asked the difference between a Creole and an official language and my professor suggested that the only difference is political and that the lower class and more oppressed people’s language would be considered a creole and not an official language. This paper however says that a pidgin becomes creole when it is the first language spoken by a new generation and that creole only becomes its own language with the death of the use of the higher prestige language the creole was born from. I wonder if this is the case why languages like Catalan are not considered creoles as Spanish is still widely spoken in Catalonia. Its very interesting reading about the varying degrees of language mixing in this paper and I would like to learn more about this subject and its application in bilingual students and bilingual education specifically.
It seems the definition of CM and CS vary depending on the context of the research. Here CM refers to intrasentential while CS refers to intersentential. The reality that I observed living in Quebec and other multilingual environments is that CM and CS occur concurrently. The Myers-Scotton MLF model lies on the assumption that there is always a Matrix Language (ML) and an Embedded Language (EL). To the extent that this is often true, MacSwan argues that the CM/CS model does not adequately describe the grammar of this system and does not fit within Chomsky’s Minimalist program. The constraints on this system outlined in the paper are particularly interesting in the sense that they seek to account for some of the features of bilingual grammar. THe authors’ description of speaker intent and the discourse pragmatics aspect of CM/CS is very fascinating as it is analyzed in speech communities in a variety of cultural contexts.