Bilingualism and the Analysis of Talk at Work: Code-Switching as a Resource For the Organization of Action and Interaction

Abstract

One major characteristic of bilingualism is the way that speakers deploy resources from what may be recognized as two different languages. The meanings of such code-switching, or the motivations of language alternation in bilingual talk, have been discussed within a variety of theoretical paradigms. Whereas the ‘allocational’ paradigm represented by Fishman’s domain analysis sees social structure as determining language choices, the ‘interactional’ paradigm introduced by Gumperz sees these choices as a way of locally achieving a specifi c interactional order (Wei 2005: 376). Within the latter paradigm, conversation analysis (CA) takes a specifi c stance, stressing the importance of the situated moment-by-moment organization of interaction, of the intelligibility it has for the participants, and of the membership categories that are achieved and made relevant within the interaction itself. Within this framework, the sense of the plurilingual resources used by speakers can neither be mechanistically related to a set of predetermined factors, such as identities or social structures, nor associated with imputed intentions, strategies or goals of the participants. Instead, the questions asked (and answered through analyses of empirical data) are: how do participants orient to bilingual resources? Which problems are solved by participants’ procedures of exploiting bilingual resources? What intelligibility is given to these resources through the specifi c and local ways in which they are mobilized? What kind of ‘procedural consequentiality’ does the orientation have for the construction of identities, social categories or language diversity, i.e. what are the demonstrable consequences of this orientation and its manifestation in the specifi c sequential unfolding and organization of the interaction?