Codeswitching in a child's monologues

Abstract

This study focuses on the switching and separation of codes in the soliloquies of a 5-year-old bilingual (French/English). It was considered that self speech offered a window into language use as it occurred under conditions cut off from exterior social pressures. In fact, the transcriptions of the recorded monologues show little, but very specific types of language alternation: code changing toward the child's preferred language when the mother (who speaks his non dominant language with him) leaves the room, and some nonce borrowing and borrowing. When placed within a rational actor theory (Myers-Scotton, this issue), it would seem bilinguals have a clearly preferred, unmarked language which is used almost uniquely when they are left alone and given the choice, with the freedom to borrow from the other language. The results show that it is not only social constraints that act on bilinguals to separate their languages. The occurrence of dispreference markers at the site of a code change, as opposed to a lack of these markers for borrowed terms, seems to indicate that borrowing should be distinguished from other types of code alternation. That codeswitching serves an interpersonal, communicative function in social speech is confirmed through the rarity of this phenomenon in monologues where such a function does not apply.