Code-switching in Bilinguals: Impacts of Mental Processes and Language Awareness

Code-switching is a widespread phenomenon in bilingual speech, and it is therefore not surprising that a great proportion of research on bilingualism focuses on this topic. Most researchers, who have paid attention to code-switching, have however been concerned with the sociological interpretation and discourse functions, i.e. the socio-pragmatic aspect, of code-switching. For this reason, linguists who do not specialize in bilingualism often automatically assume that research in code-switching means sociolinguistic research. It is certainly an interesting issue to investigate when and why a speaker chooses one linguistic variety rather than another: this can be explained by stylistic or metaphorical motivation, where factors such as the interlocutor, social role, domain, topic, venue, medium, and type of interaction play an important role. In this case, language alternation can also serve as a conversational cue, expressing attitudes towards language or marking linguistic identity (cf. TabouretKeller 1995, Auer (ed.) 1998). Only in recent years has research on the patterns of code-switching, i.e. its grammatical structure, become increasingly focused on in bilingualism research (s. Myers-Scotton 2002: 10ff). Researchers in this field discuss the types of code-switching structures that are possible within a given data set. It is possible to offer interesting indications about the underlying structure of language systems by analyzing code-switching constraints, i.e. the points within a sentence at which the transition from one language to the other is possible. This approach can be described as the grammatical approach to code-switching (cf. Auer 1998: 3). Beside this merely systematic aspect, there is a third approach to code-switching that has not yet been widely considered, but which has been discussed by Michael Clyne in a number of his publications (e.g. Clyne 1967, 1991, 2003). This third aspect is psycholinguistically motivated codeswitching: language alternation that is prompted not by the intentions of the speaker but by the specific conditions of language production. In this case it is not the use of language (as in the sociolinguistically conditioned approach) nor the system (as in the grammatical approach) that is the focus of discussion but the processes taking place in the speaker’s brain: lexical items that are similar or identical in both languages can function as a trigger for the alternation from one language to another. Such instances provide interesting insights into the processes of mental representation of bilingualism on the one hand and bilingual language processing on the other. In contrast to socio-pragmatically conditioned codeswitching, the speaker in this case does not alter the language with a specific conversational aim. This means that the code-switching has no function in the local conversational context, especially when the “global interactional behaviour” (Franceschini 1998: 61) is based on code-switching, i.e. when languages or codes are not discrete in a given context (Franceschini 1998: 58 speaks of “non-functional uses of CS [= code-switching]”). Because of the obvious difference between these two types of code-