Code-Switching in Computer-Mediated Communication

Magisterarbeit von Hanna Devic

Introduction:

It has now been about a decade and a half since the Internet and the World Wide Web have come to represent a major realm of research in various fields of linguistics. This is of course largely due to the fact that they offer easy access to a massive and unlimited amount of language data, which do not have to be transcribed in arduous ways as is the case with speech recordings. However, alongside this major cause of attraction, and despite the overall dominance of English, it is also the multilingual nature of the Internet which has naturally sparked the interest of bilingualism research as well as language contact research. It is the choice of and the switching between the available codes of the users' repertoires which mark a major topic of interest, and which shall be explored in the thesis at hand. The final focus of investigation will be the communicative functions and meanings of the phenomenon called code-switching (CS) as it naturally occurs in a Canadian-Croatian discussion forum.

In order to prepare the theoretical ground for the analysis of my own corpus of computer-mediated communication (CMC) data, the first part of this research thesis will define the subject-matter and the origins of research into it, and a general overview of the classic linguistic treatment of the phenomenon will be given. Following, this paper will illustrate the major concepts and approaches relevant to the final purpose of the thesis, and point out potential critique of their assumptions. In order to establish a link between code-switching phenomena in general and their communicative setting in the conducted study, the subsequent chapter will address several issues in computer-mediated communication research. Thereafter a review of renowned studies of code-switching phenomena in computer-mediated communication will be provided.

Finally, the Croworld corpus, including its compilation and structure, and the backgrounds of the users involved, will be presented. My subsequent analysis of selected forum posts will aim to relate the tenets of the classic approaches, as well as the insights of the CMC studies regarding the significance of code-switching practices

Table of Contents:

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Chapter 3.2, Myers-Scotton and the Markedness Model: Carol Myers-Scotton's model for code-switching is the most comprehensively stated contribution to the study of social motivations for code-switching phenomena. Although the following account will mainly draw on her 1993 version of Social Motivations For Codeswitching - Evidence from Africa, I do think that as for chronology as well as alignment, this chapter best fits in between the ones on Gumperz and Auer, since she already engaged in research in the matter as early as the 1970s. Just as Gumperz' approach, Myers-Scotton's is termed an interactional one, and it is furthermore considered as complementing more general social psychological approaches. This is also obvious from the build-up of the above mentioned publication, which features as motivations, or background respectively, an extensive account of prominent themes from the disciplines of the sociology of language, pragmatics, social anthropology and linguistic anthropology, on which Myers-Scotton based the subsequent depiction of her code-switching model. I will here proceed similarly, first pointing out those themes of the study of language in use highlighted by Myers-Scotton, which I find particularly salient with regard to the paper at hand, then giving an account of the Markedness Model (MM).

In consideration of the above discussed terminological diversity in CS research, it may be worth mentioning that Myers-Scotton uses the terms codeswitching and code selection or choice in turns, and as for her own model does not give distinctions of any kind.

To begin with, Myers-Scotton reflects upon precursors to her model, here being of interest her views on Gumperz' approach. She perfectly well agrees with Gumperz' proclamation that motivations for language use are to be sought not only in social identity and situational factors, that is in what she calls the stable factors, but just as well, or partly even rather, for that matter, in the dynamic factors, namely in the possibility of ‘conveying (intentional) meaning of a socio-pragmatic nature through code choice’ (my parentheses, since Gumperz himself does not explicitly use the term 'intentional'). In her critique of Gumperz, Myers-Scotton calls his work ‘primarily descriptive’ and disapproves of his and many fellow researchers' tendency to produce what she calls ‘open-ended taxonomies’, that is listings of (stylistic) functions of the CS phenomenon. The taxonomists she also relates to the insistence on looking at each interaction individually and on its own terms, while she herself thinks it vital to ‘believe in the possibility of generalizing across interactions’, in order to allow for explanatory models of a more general kind to emerge.

Prerequisites to and Premises of the Markedness Model: Before stating the actual model, Myers-Scotton establishes several basic conditions. For a start, participants in any given conversation are understood to share an (unconscious) awareness that their interaction partners' expectations regarding various aspects of the communicative event more or less meet their own.

A second assumption, which encompasses various concepts to be discussed in succession, is that of interactants acting purposefully when engaging in conversation. Regarding the question of the degree of consciousness involved, 'goal-oriented' may be a less ambiguous description, since Myers-Scotton's participants in conversation act unconsciously, just like Gumperz' do. The goal-oriented interactant is called rational actor by a number of researchers in speaker motivations. This social psychological framework considers social interaction as a process of exchange and uses economic metaphors to describe the matter: rationality, the linchpin of the entire communicational event, directs interactants to perform a cost-benefit analysis of given alternatives and to finally make choices which optimise their rewards, that is choices which yield the best possible returns. Myers-Scotton incorporated this mindset into her CS model in the early 1970s, and then kept developing its consequences in the following decades. From the beginning, her rationale has been that a major motivation for using one variety rather than another as a medium of an interaction is the extent to which this choice minimizes costs and maximizes rewards for the speaker. Myers-Scotton's speakers thus engage in code-switching practice as the result of their calculation showing that the aimed for rewards will be greater with an utterance involving a switch than with a monolingual one.

Howard Giles' speech accommodation theory (or, more recently, communication accommodation theory) similarly ties in with both the speaker as rational actor and the cost-benefit analysis. Myers-Scotton hence includes the concept in her markedness model in the sense that interactants achieve accommodation or convergence with and divergence from their conversation partners by their code-switching practice.

Another premise of Myers-Scotton's model, which takes us one step further towards the actual markedness model, is the picture of several sets of rights and obligations (RO), which are thought of as abstract constructs representing the attitudes and expectations that interactants hold towards each other. She shares that aspect with Gumperz, though in comparison he did not elaborate greatly on the concept. In Myers-Scotton's version, any code choice is indexical of a corresponding RO set between interactants in a given type of interaction. The switching between codes then is according to her a clear signal of two possible scenarios: (1) the speaker is either unwilling to, or uncertain whether or not to, commit to any single RO set between interactants, or (2) the speaker seeks to change the established RO set, which makes CS a negotiation for a new set of rights and obligations. When in the complex course of language acquisition speakers come to know the community's available RO sets, they simultaneously form a sense of indexicality of code choices for these sets. As for the source of the RO sets, Myers-Scotton describes them to derive from situational features (relative statuses of the speakers, topic, setting etc.). This statement has entailed that a couple of critics put her model on one level with Gumperz' situational switching, and only with his situational switching. In a later publication she thus felt the need to clarify that for the RO sets to be derived from situational factors does not at all mean that the situational factors per se predefine code choices. She allows for speakers' awareness that situation, RO set and code choice are somehow linked, yet at the same time insists that this awareness is only one of several ingredients that make up the optimal choice.

A final premise now concerns the main constituent of the markedness model: markedness is a concept that originated from the Prague School of linguistic thought in the first half of the 20th century and entered structural linguistics as a phonological concept. For its – meanwhile – diverse applications to various kinds of linguistic as well as cultural phenomena the general meaning of marked ‘is characterized by the conveyance of more precise, specific, and additional information than the unmarked term provides’. However, Myers-Scotton's understanding of markedness does not match that of the Prague School. She equates what she terms the unmarked choice with the expected medium, and accordingly the marked choice with the unusual medium in conventionalised interaction. Myers-Scotton's premise is that all interactants are equipped with a so-called markedness metric, which she adds to a general concept of linguistic competence and which allows for interactants to assess each and every code choice as more or less marked or unmarked. Since Myers-Scotton argues that in spite of an intrinsic markedness measurement, it is through practical experience of language use in a specific community that readings of markedness occur, she sees a normative framework as inextricably linked with the notion of marked and unmarked choices. Remove it, and an interpretation of choices will be rendered unfeasible, as interactants would be lacking any kind of script or schema to orient to, such goes her argumentation.