Bilingualism in the Community
Code-switching and Grammars in Contact

Analysis of bilinguals' use of two languages reveals highly adept code-switching: alternating between languages while keeping intact the separate grammars.

Rena Torres Cacoullos (Author), Catherine E. Travis (Author)

9781108402415, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 April 2020

256 pages, 61 b/w illus. 1 map 17 tables
22.9 x 15.3 x 1.9 cm, 0.35 kg

'Bilingualism in the Community sets a high standard of variationist studies of contact-induced change and applies a systematic comparative methodology that includes comparing with a previous, monolingual variety and monolingual benchmarks. The book is in general very well written and is recommended to scholars interested in language contact, variation, and the interplay of the two both within and outside the variationist framework.' Maria Khachaturyan, The LINGUIST List

Does the use of two languages by bilinguals inevitably bring about grammatical change? Does switching between languages serve as a catalyst in such change? It is widely held that linguistic code-switching inherently promotes grammatical convergence - languages becoming more similar to each other through contact; evidence for this, however, remains elusive. A model of how to study language contact scientifically, Bilingualism in the Community highlights variation patterns in speech, using a new bilingual corpus of English and Spanish spontaneously produced by the same speakers. Putting forward quantitative diagnostics of grammatical similarity, it shows how bilinguals' two languages differ from each other, aligning with their respective monolingual benchmarks. The authors argue that grammatical change through contact is far from a foregone conclusion in bilingual communities, where speakers are adept at keeping their languages together, yet separate. The book is compelling reading for anyone interested in bilingualism and its importance in society.

1. Language contact through the lens of variation
2. The community basis of bilingual phenomena
3. Good data: Capturing language use
4. Characterizing the bilingual speaker
5. Subject pronoun expression: reconsidering the constraints
6. Cross-language comparisons: foundations for assessing contact-induced change
7. Assessing change and continuity
8. The most intimate contact: the bilinguals' two languages
9. Code-switching without convergence
10. Code-switching and priming
11. Bilingualism in its linguistic and social context.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Bilingualism & multilingualism [CFDM], Language acquisition [CFDC], Psycholinguistics [CFD], Sociolinguistics [CFB], Linguistics [CF], Language [C]