Bilingual Speech, A Typology of Code-Mixing (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bilingual speech, a typology of code-mixing by Pieter Muysken Carol Myers-Scotton Bilingual speech, a typology of code-mixing. By Pieter Muysken. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 306. In his second chapter, Pieter Muysken refers to languages as fortresses. He addresses the ambitious question of ‘how code-mixing breaks into these fortresses’ (41). M deserves credit for beginning to answer this question. He provides much empirical data from the code-mixing (CM) literature about the ways that one language impinges on the walls of another in contact situations. His analysis largely explores the exterior of the walls, that is, the linear representations of bilingual speech, not the structural dependencies and hierarchies entailed. However, in some sense, the volume is an intellectual journey, and along the way M somewhat changes his perspective. For most of the volume, he sees classifying how the surfaces of the walls are breeched (and relating this to typological differences) as a satisfactory answer. Thus, much of his analysis consists of a labeling of bilingual speech examples according to types. However, at journey’s end, he suggests that how bilingual speech is possible and the form it takes may be better answered by paying more attention to bilingual language processing and ‘complex structural dependency and simultaneous presence’ (251). He suggests, ‘Both languages are accessed, but different modules of each’ (253). Thus, late in the volume he becomes more interested in the nonsequential aspects of how languages can be fortresses yet how elements from two linguistic systems can combine. Otherwise, as the title promises, this is a typology of code-mixing. M introduces this volume as a synthesis of research on CM in terms of three processes, claiming they ‘correspond to dominant models for code-mixing that have been proposed’ (3). However, I see his efforts more as a compilation of examples grouped in terms of the three processes he identifies: insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalization. Even though the title is ‘bilingual speech’, M doesn’t consider all types of speech with elements from two (or more) languages. He emphasizes speech with two participating languages within a single sentence or clause. The study is almost entirely focused on the structural side of such speech. M introduces the terminology he prefers in Ch. 1. He also indicates that no separate model for code-mixing is necessary, stating ‘… I do not think there is such a model, apart from the general models provided by grammatical theory and language processing’ (3). What is CM? M states that CM will refer to ‘all cases where lexical items and grammatical features from two languages appear in one sentence’ (1). He reserves the more commonly used term code-switching ‘for the rapid succession of several languages in a single speech event’ (1). This means he utilizes code-switching (CS) only for alternational code-mixing (4), that is, cases of a full constituent in one language followed by one in another language. A possible virtue of CM over CS is that its stated definition could cover all language contact phenomena. But just after defining CM, M writes, ‘Of course it will be necessary to separate cases of codemixing from lexical borrowing’. Of course? Of course, not including borrowing allows M to implicitly endorse approaches to CM that do not account for most singly-occurring forms from a second language in a base/matrix language frame. Later in the volume, M discusses lexical borrowing at many points, typically treating it ‘as a special type of insertion’ (33). Also, at one point he discusses the same type of data from the same corpus as ‘insertions’ (16) and later as ‘nonce mixes’ (239). Because insertion is one of his three types of CM, the status of [End Page 330] borrowing as CM or not is never clarified. Nor is any theory of borrowing discussed. He claims to separate CM and borrowing, stating ‘Code-mixing can be conceived of as involving words with different language indices … inserted into a phrase structure … and lexical borrowing as involving formatives … inserted into a foreign word structure’ (71). But how can we tell when singly-occurring forms are inserted into a phrase structure or inserted into a...