Bilingualism in the Community. Code-Switching and Grammars in Contact by Rena Torres Cacuollos and Catherine E. Travis (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bilingualism in the Community. Code-Switching and Grammars in Contact by Rena Torres Cacuollos and Catherine E. Travis Irene Checa-Garcia Rena Torres Cacuollos and Catherine E. Travis. Bilingualism in the Community. Code-Switching and Grammars in Contact. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2018. 239p. Bilingualism in the Community. Code-switching and Grammars in Contact is an in-depth study, likely the deepest to date, on transfer in a linguistic contact situation. Although centered on the topic of pronominal subject expression in patrimonial New Mexican Spanish in contact with English, this is, above all, an extremely rigorous methodological proposal for language contact and transfer. Unlike English, Spanish allows for the ellipsis of the subject in most contexts, so its expression via a pronoun is not mandatory as it usually is in English. Because of this difference in optionality, pronominal subjects have been a frequent locus of research into a possible influence of one language, English, into another, Spanish, particularly in areas where English is the dominant language and has higher overt prestige. Previous studies have hypothesized that this asymmetrical contact situation should produce a transfer of English structures over Spanish. This would mean an increased frequency of pronominal subject expression vs. subject ellipsis in Spanish clauses. Several studies have counted frequencies of expressed subjects vs. non-expressed subjects in the contact variety and non-contact monolingual varieties in order to verify this hypothesis. Torres Cacuollos and Travis challenge the assumption that this traditional approach is sufficient. Instead, they offer a much more sophisticated and considerate model to answer two basic questions: (i) is there really a change on pronominal subject use? and (ii) if there is, is it due to contact, or rather due to some internal change? The key to their approach is to not only compare the bilingual varieties to both languages as benchmarks but to do so only in those contexts where there is a real variation. The authors pay special attention to the differential amount and direction of influence of different factors in the benchmarks and target bilingual varieties. They are looking for a [End Page 93] "transfer of factors' impact" (coreferentiality, previous mention, type of verb, etc.) so to speak, rather than structures frequencies. In addition, current New Mexican Spanish is compared to a previous stage of New Mexican Spanish and even to situations of direct contact during code-switching. The book is subsequently organized according to this methodological proposal. After presenting the scope of the book and the basic tenets of the methodology in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 presents detailed characteristics of the speech community studied, bilingual English and Spanish speakers in New Mexico. Chapter 3 continues this presentation by explaining the data collection method, the corpus organization, and its tagging and segmentation in intonational units. Chapter 4 shows how a detailed collection of data led to question some dichotomies (L1 vs. L2) and highlights the need to collect some other information instead (language preference vs. language actual use, for example). Chapters 5 and 6 expose the constraints on subject expression variability in Spanish and English respectively, revealing the true nature of the languages' differences with respect to these variants. Chapter 7 then compares current New Mexican Spanish to a previous stage of the variety as well as to the two monolingual benchmarks. The main focus is in comparing trends, that is, if the same factors influence the use of pronominal subjects vs. ellipsis in the two stages of the varieties. The next two chapters, 9 and 10, focus on the actual title of the book, code-switching, which roughly consists of changing from Spanish to English and vice versa in one's speech. Chapter 9 deals with the theoretical and cognitive basis of code-switching types and how to read the potential results. Chapter 10 looks at the actual effects of the contact in code-switching, which are due to the alteration of factors' proportion presences, rather than on pronouns' frequencies or how the factors influence those. Frequencies of pronominal subject expression are then not due to a transfer, but to the difference in contexts' and factors' proportions as a result of a larger presence of the other language where such contexts...