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  • Essay / Spanglish Code Switching Research

    Table of ContentsIntroductionDiscussionWorks Cited:IntroductionSpanglish, for the Oxford English Dictionary (2017), is defined as "a hybrid language combining words from Spanish and English ". This hybridization can follow two patterns: the first is lexical borrowing, a word which, due to different factors, social, historical, etc., has been transferred from one language to another; and code switching, which will be the main point of this essay. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayAccording to Logman (2010), the term code-switching refers to "a change by a speaker (or writer) of a language or linguistic variety." to another. Code-switching can take place in a conversation when one speaker uses one language and another speaker responds in a different language. This term has been mentioned in the field of bilingualism, since in 1917 Espinosa mentioned a "mixture of words" in New Mexican. There are different types of code switching, such as "intra-sentential", which is used for switches within the sentence. the sentence, unlike “inter-sentence” used to move from one sentence to another. Additionally, the terms "tag switching", "iconic switching", or "extra-sentential switching" are used to refer to a switching between an utterance and the tag or interjection attached to it. With this in mind, the aim of this essay is to attempt to demonstrate whether there is a pattern of code-switching that Spanglish speakers follow in order to make it more standard, and thereby demonstrate that Spanglish does not should not be as discredited as by native speakers of English in the North. America, where this language is predominant among the Latin American population, such as Puerto Ricans or Mexicans. DiscussionSpanglish is a hybrid language found in bilingual Spanish and English communities, as it might be the Latino community that lives in the United States. But not only is this community characterized by this language, but also the inhabitants of Gibraltar, where they are constantly in contact with Spanish culture, or the Mexicans who live the same situation as in Gibraltar. In the previously mentioned situations, the entire community is bilingual in English and Spanish, so the possibility of code switching is greater. However, the fact that they were able to speak both languages ​​does not mean that code usage - their switching produced a mixed code, but a combination thereof. As we can see previously, they produce utterances in which they combine the two codes, English and Spanish, but they do not produce a new code resulting from the mixture of these two languages. For example, in a Spanglish sentence such as It is sunny today, let's go to the beach a pasar un bon rato. In this case, the speaker does not use a new code, since the morphological structure used is that of English, what differs from this language is simply the insertion of the expression "a pasar un buen rato" because the speaker probably does not. not knowing any similar expression in English to express this, so he turns to Spanish, in which there is an expression that fulfills what the speaker wanted to express. Taking into account what is mentioned before, according to Myers Cotton (1993) in code-switching, the main language used is called "matrix", which means that in the utterance produced by the speaker, a large quantity of words will appear in this language rather than the second. This second language is called “embedded”. To determine which oftwo languages ​​is the base language (or matrix language), there are different suggestions depending on the field of study. According to psycholinguistics, the matrix language would be determined by the competence of the speaker, the language in which the speaker is most proficient will be the matrix language. Whereas from the point of view of a statistical answer, it would definitely depend on which of the two languages ​​the speaker uses more words in the utterance. However, these answers are not sufficiently robust. In terms of grammatical analysis, the researchers also gave two answers that seem more precise: the first word that appears on the utterance determines the matrix language, for example whether the speaker begins the utterance. in Spanish and later in English, according to this theory, the matrix language will be Spanish, although interjections or exclamatives should not be taken into account if they are in the first position in the utterance. The other answer that we can give in this area is that the language in which the main verb of the statement appears corresponds to the matrix language. Despite the amount of studies done today on code-switching, "historically, many researchers believed that it was used by speakers with a low level of proficiency in one of two languages, usually the second" . This idea of ​​the use of code-switching in bilingual communities such as English-Spanish, has been proposed by other authors, such as Toribio who states that "the lack of attention paid to code-switching, probably due to the fact that many early researchers denounced this "mixture of speeches" as a random linguistic behavior, therefore "deviant", attributable to deficits in intelligence, manners or linguistic mastery, and whose inexorable end was linguistic and societal. second language proficiency and how this affects the way the utterance is produced. Backer carried out a study in 1997 in which he was aware that second language proficiency could be seen through the way the speaker uses code switching, thus demonstrating that those with low proficiency used inter switching. -phrastic. , so as not to violate grammatical rules, while those who are more competent use intra-sentential switching. It is worth emphasizing, in terms of the structure of switching, that it is more common for a bilingual speaker to change the noun instead of another element. As Lipski argued in 1982, taking into account an earlier study in 1981, name changes give bilingual speakers "a ready word that may not be found in one language or that, for whatever reason, seems be expressed more appropriately in one language than in another. In this essay, the topic is code-switching in Spanglish, however according to Finlayson, Calteaux and Myers-Scotton in 1998, the term code-switching and the term Spanglish appear to be different and cannot be related to each other. other. . Spanglish does not need to follow any rules, whereas in code-switching the speaker must follow certain grammatical rules, as it could be that the matrix language establishes the grammatical framework of the sentence produced. These two statements confirm that because code-switching and Spanglish seem completely different, they cannot be used in a related way, one being part of the other. On the other hand, for other authors, such as Luna and Peracchio (2005), Spanglish and codeswitching may be equivalent in use. They state that "Spanish-English code-switching is part of Spanglish", meaning that Spanish-English code-switching is one of the parts that constitute Spanglish, among other things,and that these two terms should not be considered different. elements, but as part of the others. Results and discussion structures. Although Spanish and English can be considered completely different, one is a Romance language, while the other is a Germanic language, some patterns can be swapped from one language to the other without having to change the structure of the statement. , such as "Let's go to the swimming pool because hace calor" in this case the speaker has just changed the language of "hace calor" but the structure of the utterance is the same. The fact that the speaker uses code switching does not change the meaning or pattern of the structure since the two languages ​​follow similar grammatical rules. Spanglish is a language that appears more frequently in communities where the majority is bilingual, e.g. Latino community in the United States, or more specifically in Miami and surrounding cities. The use of Spanglish in conversation, and specifically code-switching in utterances, can also be seen as a way of retaining their origins and creating a signal of identity. The use of code switching shows the identity of the speaker, because normally those who use Spanglish most fluently are young people born in Miami, for example, and because of this, their command of English is almost perfect, and as their family language is Spanish, they have many expressions or words that have their equivalent in English but to maintain their other language, they use them. In the example presented above, the speaker has a good level of competence in both languages. However, one of them must be considered the matrix language, that is, the main language in which the speaker can communicate. There are different readings on how this language should be noticed. One of them is the grammatical analysis proposed by Muysken. On this, the language in which the first word appears in the utterance delimits the matrix language. If we take this analysis into account, if the speaker begins to express in a language, the use of that language is unconscious, therefore the language most used to speak and in which he is most proficient is the basis of your speech ; while in the other language proficiency must also be high, but the number of uses and the contexts in which it will be used make it less important and thus occupy the role of integrated language. Another important point is to know from which of the two languages ​​the utterance follows the structure. According to what was mentioned previously about the "main" language of the utterance and the less important language, the main language used in the utterance, also called matrix language, should be the one that brings the morphosyntactic pattern to the statement. , as Myers (1995) says. The fact that the main language used determines the language pattern is entirely logical, since the language in which the speaker produces the utterance in Broca's area is English, so the entire pattern of the utterance is in this language, while the second language, fills an empty space in the speaker's knowledge. However, for this to be possible, the two languages ​​would have to have certain patterns in common, and these patterns would be ones that could be exchanged from one language to the other. If English and Spanish did not have these similarities, Spanglish could not exist, as if you had two different languages ​​that have nothing in common, merging the two into one would not be possible because it This would result in statements that would have no meaning. . The speaker would have a really hard time trying to hybridize two languages ​​whose structures cannot be replaced by the other. We think.