Oldal 26 [26]
CHAPTER 3 LITERATURE REVIEW
provided the normative framework of the Markedness Model?. She claims that
all instances of code-switching can be interpreted as universal realizations
of the speakers’ rights and obligations defined by a particular sociocultural
context. The actual associations between language choices and the instantiated
rights and obligations, however, are community specific depending on the
community’s social norms. Furthermore, she claims that, with the help of their
linguistic choices, more particularly by code-switching, individual speakers
do not only express but also try to negotiate their “rights and obligations”,
the normative social constraints specific in and relevant to a given speech
community. Consequently, code-switching is seen as a linguistic device serving
the idiosyncratic motivations of the speaker in the process of negotiating and
indexing meaning against or in line with the expected rules and obligations,
the normative social constraints, of a speech community.
The Markedness Model is an attempt to unify sociolinguistic and cognitive
approaches in order to understand the real nature of code-switching.
Linguistic choices are seen as determined by universal cognitive processes
as the markedness metric, which actually assesses the linguistic choice as
marked, unmarked, is an innate cognitive human faculty. However, the actual
community specific set of rights and obligations in which these linguistic
choices gain their actual meaning of markedness or unmarkedness are
determined by constructed sociocultural norms. Therefore, linguistic choices
are constrained by a universal innate cognitive faculty as well as by community
specific constructed sociocultural norms.
The bottom line of Myers-Scotton’s approach is that there are rights and
obligations shared by a specific speech community. As such, all linguistic
choices are an “indexical set of rights and obligations holding between
participants in the conversational exchange”™*. Relying on this theoretical
assumption, all conventionalized conversational exchanges can be interpreted
as marked or unmarked choices*®. The unmarked choices are the expected ones,
complying with the community’s sociocultural, pragmatic and linguistic sets
of rights and obligations**. The utterances in non-conventionalized exchanges
are exploratory, which means that they are of idiosyncratic nature and can
be interpreted as individual linguistic choices of experimental nature rather
than utterances interpretable in a particular sociocultural normative context.
33° Myers-Scotton, The negotiation of identities, International Journal of the Sociology of
Language, 115-136; Myers-Scotton, Code-switching as indexal of social negotiations, 151¬
186; Myers-Scotton, Social Motivations for Code-switching; Myers-Scotton, A theoretical
introduction to the Markedness Model, 18-38
34 Myers-Scotton, Code-switching as indexal of social negotiations, 152
35 Myers-Scotton, Ibid.; Myers-Scotton, Social Motivations for Code-switching
3° Myers-Scotton, Social Motivations for Code-switching
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