What happens - sociologically, linguistically, educationally, politically - when more than one language is in regular use in a community? How do speakers handle these languages simultaneously, and what influence does this language contact have on the languages involved? Although most people in the world use more than one language in everyday life, the approach to the study of language has usually been that monolingualism is the norm. The recent interest in bilingualism and language contact has led to a number of new approaches, based on research in communities in many different parts of the world. This book draws together this diverse research, looking at examples from many different situations, to present the topic in any easily accessible form. Language contact is looked at from four distinct perspectives. The authors consider bilingual societies; bilingual speakers; language use in the bilingual community; finally language itself (do languages change when in contact with each other? Can they borrow rules of grammar, or just words? How can new languages emerge from language contact?). The result is a clear, concise synthesis offering a much needed overview of this lively area of language study.

Language Contact and Bilingualism

Corpus linguistics is the study of language data on a large scale – the computer-aided analysis of very extensive collections of transcribed utterances or written texts This textbook outlines the basic methods of corpus linguistics, explains how the discipline of corpus linguistics developed and surveys the major approaches to the use of corpus data It uses a broad range of examples to show how corpus data has led to methodological and theoretical innovation in linguistics in general Clear and detailed explanations lay out the key issues of method and theory in contemporary corpus linguistics A structured and coherent narrative links the historical development of the field to current topics in 'mainstream' linguistics Practical tasks and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter encourage students to test their understanding of what they have read and an extensive glossary provides easy access to definitions of technical terms used in the text

Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice

Code‐switching in situations of language contact has been studied largely from the point of view of its social determinants. This paper will propose formal means for describing the syntax of code‐switching with examples from Puerto Rican Spanish and English.

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A formal grammar for code‐switching 1

Translanguaging is a new term in bilingual education; it supports a heteroglossic language ideology, which views bilingualism as valuable in its own right. Some translanguaging scholars have questioned the existence of discrete languages, further concluding that multilingualism does not exist. I argue that the political use of language names can and should be distinguished from the social and structural idealizations used to study linguistic diversity, favoring what I call an integrated multilingual model of individual bilingualism, contrasted with the unitary model and dual competence model. I further distinguish grammars from linguistic repertoires, arguing that bilinguals, like monolinguals, have a single linguistic repertoire but a richly diverse mental grammar. I call the viewpoint developed here a multilingual perspective on translanguaging.

A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging

The aim of this paper is to argue that the process of code-mixing is constrained by the government relation that holds between the constituents of a sentence. The government constraint replaces a number of specific constraints that have been proposed in the literature to account for apparently ‘impossible’, ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘non-occurring’ types of intra-sentential switches. Code-mixing is a form of linguistic behaviour which produces utterances consisting of elements taken from the lexicons of different languages. Some examples are given in (1).

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Government and code-mixing

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Étude de l’interaction verbale chez des montréalais d’origine italienne

Nous proposons d’etendre la classe des predicats legers (lights verbs) pour y inclure les verbes causatifs et a restructuration de l’italien. Leur structure d’argument contient des positions vides et ils forment des predicats complexes avec des predicats lourds par identification de positions d’arguments. Les proprietes argumentales d’un complexe avec volere (vouloir) sont celles du predicat lourd; quant a celles d’un complexe avec fare (faire), elles sont attribuees au fait que ce dernier a un argument externe specifie. La formation de predicat complexe s’effectue au niveau de la Structure d’Argument, bien que la classe des predicats (quasi-)legers soit definie au niveau de la Structure Lexicale Conceptuelle : les predicats s-selectionnent des evenements. Un predicat (quasi-)leger est coindexe a un predicat lourd en structure-P et en Forme Logique.

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Constructions à prédicats légers et quasi-légers

Nous argumentons en faveur d’une definition strictement intrinseque et syntaxique de la categorie des variables dans le cadre de la theorie gouvernement-liage. L’analyse de structures de l’italien contenant des objets nuls, des PROarb et des pronoms resomptifs appuie l’idee que les notions de variable syntaxique et de variable semantique ne sont pas coextensives. Des arguments qui ont trait a la typologie des categories vides et aux proprietes de la theorie unifiee du liage, au sens de McA’Nulty (1983) et di Sciullo (1982), justifient independamment une definition intrinseque de la categorie des variables syntaxiques. Dans notre systeme, les variables sont les seules categories vides marquees d’un Cas, ce qui les rend grammaticalement distinctes des autres categories vides. En outre, des definitions contextuelles pour les categories syntaxiques, et donc pour les variables syntaxiques, sont exclues par les principes de la theorie grammaticale que nous proposons.

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Sur la définition des variables

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Anne-Marie Di Sciullo

Papers

Government and code-mixing

Étude de l’interaction verbale chez des montréalais d’origine italienne

Constructions à prédicats légers et quasi-légers

Sur la définition des variables

Les symétries, les structures de base et les formes logiques