Socio-pragmatic Mechanisms in Bilingual Speech: evidence from Algerian Arabic/French intra-sentential code-switching

Abstract

This research work tries to shed some lights on the socio-pragmatic mechanisms underlying the alternative use of two codes in the course of a single conversation, namely the passage from Algerian Arabic to French and vice-versa. The main objective is to clarify some controversial theoretical notions to be applied within an Algerian context and to give empirical evidence for initial hypotheses related to the social behaviour of some Algerian bilingual speakers.

The results of the application of theoretical findings from different disciplines (syntax, cognitive psychology and contact linguistics) on data, recorded in different contexts at the University of Oran, are presented and interpreted in the light of Myers-Scotton’s matrix-language models, namely the MLF and its supportive sub-models. The framework adopted in this micro-sociolinguistic study is socio-psycholinguistic. We attempt to explain the connection between the linguistic, social and psychological mechanisms which underlie the process of selection in code-switching and the systemic conversion rules in borrowing.

We have concluded that AA/Fr intra-sentential code-switching is used by our informants as a communicative strategy, a device which signals identity-construction in the case of MSA/AA code-switching and index social relations in other contexts. The bilingual use in mixed-codes is not only structurally determined but rather psycho-linguistically conditioned. In fact, the process of triggering is not structural in nature but a set of social parameters and a number of cognitive operations are manifested in code-choice. We consider in this work that the context of proliferation is not stable, rather; it is in continuous change with regard to its ultimate constituents. The passage from Algerian Arabic to French or to another code can only be explained in accordance to the co-constructed context in which the bilingual speaker is the responsible of his linguistic acts.