Page 48 [48]
CHAPTER 4 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
culturally-bound context. In bi- and multilingual communities, Faith-related
instances are fairly frequent’™ given that bi- and multilingual speakers have
a higher recognition of the different culturally grounded connotations of
their utterances than their monolingual peers. In order to capture and index
the most economically and faithfully the actual culture-bound, ideologically
grounded, semantic-conceptual meaning of a linguistic utterance, bi- and
multilingual speakers can readily rely on code-switching. By differentiating
the linguistic form of an utterance, its specificity in meaning is accentuated
more economically.
Numerous functions of code-switching listed by other researchers can be
classified under the principle of Faith. After a thorough and comprehensive
study of all sociopragmatic-related functions of code-switching in the relevant
literature, 16 have been found to comply with the definition of Faith. To name
but a few examples, code-switching functions as le mot juste (the most proper
or suitable expression)’, to express “highly specific” cultural connotations™,
“stylistic embroidery”, religious invocations’, or linguistic routines or
clichés".
With a view to illustrating how Faith works, three examples taken from pre¬
vious studies as well as from my joint research with Bolonyai will be provided.
In the examples, numbers refer to the lines and the letters stand for the
different speakers. The code-switched instance is indicated by bold letters in
italics (unless otherwise indicated). The translations are provided in brackets.
Example [1] illustrates “how CS is employed to recall and rebuild cultural
memory in the here-and-now of text production”’. The extract is taken from
an English daily newspaper in India. The figures refer to the lines.
10° Ad Backus, The role of semantic specificity in insertional code-switching: Evidence from
Dutch-Turkish, in: R. Jacobson (ed.), Code-switching Worldwide II. Trends in Linguistics.
Studies and Monographs 126, Berlin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 2001, 125-154; Cecilia
Montes-Alcala, Written code-switching: powerful bilingual images, in: Rodolfo Jacobson
(ed.), Code-switching Worldwide II. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 126, Ber¬
lin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 2001, 193-219; Rakesh M. Bhatt, In other words: Language
mixing, identity representations, and third space, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12 (2) (2008),
177-200
Carol Myers-Scotton — Janice L. Jake, Matching lemmas in a bilingual competence and
production model, Linguistics, 33 (1995), 981-1024; Penelope Gardner-Chloros — Reeva
Charles — Jenny Cheshire, Parallel patterns? A comparison of monolingual speech and
bilingual discourse, Journal of Pragmatics, 32 (2000), 1305-1341
Backus, The role of semantic specificity, 125-154
Guadalupe Valdés-Fallis, Code-switching in Bilingual Chicano Poetry, Hispania, 59 (1976),
877-886; Laura Callahan, Spanish/English Code-switching in a Written Corpus, Amsterdam/
Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004
Callahan, Spanish/English Code-switching.
14 Montes-Alcala, Written code-switching, 193-219
4S Bhatt - Bolonyai, Code-switching and the optimal grammar of bilingual use, Bilingualism:
Language and Cognition, 526
110
11
BE
11.
DS
11
u
a
+ 46 +