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Antoinette CAMILLERI GRIMA (Malta)Challenging code-switching in Malta2013, Vol. XVIII-2, pp. 45-61
This contribution highlights certain phenomena of language contact that are particularly relevant to the fully bilingual context of Malta. It seeks to illustrate how Maltese bilingual speakers utilize each of the two languages either separately or in a mixed code on a daily basis. This is a challenging reality to the general understanding of bilingual speakers, and bilingual communities who are normally not expected to know and use the two languages for the same purposes. Furthermore, in the Maltese context code-switching cannot always be explained with reference to conversational cues and/or situational and other variables. Thus it provides an interesting live context of language contact. This is elucidated here with examples from different social domains, focusing particularly on language choice and code-switching in both the written and spoken modes of communication.
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Silvia DAL NEGRO (Bolzano/Bozen, Italy)Dealing with bilingual corpora: parts of speech distribution and bilingual patterns2013, Vol. XVIII-2, pp. 15-28
This paper provides an account of a research project carried out on a multilingual corpus containing conversations that have been recorded in the bilingual region of South Tyrol, Italy. The study offers an analysis of its quantitative and qualitative distribution of languages. Moreover, it aims to shed some light on any parameter that can contribute to classify interactions according to their degree and type of bilingualism. The results of this investigation, which is based on several samples of speech, reveal that the relative frequency of parts of speech can be used to this end.
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Etienne MOREL (Neuchâtel, Suisse)Multilingual communication in texting: code switching as a way of showing membership of a globalized community2013, Vol. XVIII-2, pp. 29-43
This article explores the forms and the functions of code-switching (CS) in written communication with mobile phones. We present the major results emanating from research on CS in the SMS communication, and an analysis of a large corpus of French (Switzerland) text messages. The analysis identifies the texters hybrid language uses, and resorting to a limited number of CS types, typically morphosyntactically non complex, and related to internationalized words or formulae, associated to a limited number of domains which bare ‘cool’ and/or cosmopolitan connotations. These results suggest that CS is a resource by means of which participants display membership in a translinguistic and globalized community.
Code-switching