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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, 151186; 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 + 24e
