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1.2 TWO ZERO CODE-SWITCHING EXAMPLES FROM THE 19™ CENTURY
his life, he also visited Europe with his family several times, between 1878 and
1899. He lived for months and in some cases years in Heidelberg, Munich,
Berlin and Vienna.
Twain was also a writer who innovated the American English language.
According to Ramsay and Emberson (1938), who completed A Mark Twain
Lexicon, the writer introduced more than 4,000 spoken words for the first time
in print, used 5,000 Americanisms, but also coined new uses of old words in
a more American way. The German language influenced Twain’s language and
style as well. For example, he was so fascinated by German compound nouns
— he is described as affected by a “compound disease” — that he made some
compounds in English based on German models. This means that the German
language also played a key role in the way he wrote in English, contributing to
further innovation of the American English language.
ZCS in A Tramp Abroad
A Tramp Abroad is a book belonging to the travel writing genre par excellence.
Travel writing implies “an encounter between self and other that is brought
about by movement through space” (Thompson 2011). It entails a confrontation
with difference and otherness, which may involve linguistic diversity. The
language issue, however, might represent either a key or a marginal aspect of
a travel book. It could be fully taken up by a writer or be downsized and ren¬
dered less openly.
In A Tramp Abroad, Twain and his companion Harris interacted with locals
multiple times. They travelled on crowded trains and rafted, they stayed at
various accommodations, they went to the theatre, attended the university and
sword dueling practice, they visited museums and travelled in the Alps. During
their journey they encountered both foreigners and locals, who spoke their own
tongues — German, French, Italian — but were rarely able to understand English.
The first-person autodiegetic narrator of A Tramp Abroad, in which the
narrator is also the protagonist of the story, places languages among the key
issues of the story. The linguistic challenges he has to face - in particular, the
fact that his German is still rough and he struggles to communicate with it
— are thematized and expressed openly in the book along with contextualized
reflections on the German language and culture. This happens both via in¬
tra-sentential and inter-sentential code-switching but also through so-called
overt zero-degree code-switching, which takes place when the narrator “relates
a multilingual situation in the original language” (Domokos 2020, 47). In this
case, CS is not only rendered monolingually, as in the case of covert zero-de¬
gree code-switching, but is rather openly expressed by the narrator, who
employs it to build the fictionality of his story.
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