Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching

Abstract

Myers-Scotton’s Direlliiig Laizgirqys is a book which deals with codeswitching (CS) from a sociolinguistic, but also, and predominantly, from a linguistic and a psycholinguistic point ofviewv. The book first came out in 1993, in hardback only, but has apparently been received so well that Oxford University Press decided to bring out a new paperback edition in 1997. In fact, the word “new” is slightly misleading, since the paperback edition is an exact copy of the first edition, but a twenty page aflenvord has been added to it. In the aflenvord MyersScotton clarifies some issues that had led to misunderstandings in the earlier edition and revises certain parts to bring them in line with her current thinking. The new book, then, consists of eight chapters and an aftenvord. In Chapter I, MyersScotton states the main goal of the book: “to present a model to account for the structures in intrasential CS” (p.5). In addition, Chapter I contains a detailed description of the database used for this study, the Nairobi corpus. IVe are given an interesting description of the position of Swahili and English in Kenya, and of the sociolinguistic background of the conversations from which the codeswitches were taken. Chapter I1 offers a critical review of earlier research on CS. One of the weaknesses pointed out is that in most early research single lexemes were excluded as instances of CS. The chapter is also critical of most early proposals for structural constraints, the main problem being that they have no theoretical basis and are therefore descriptive rather than explanatory. In Chapter 111, the background for the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model is sketched. First, there is a discussion of several monolingual speech production models, notably Garrett’s (e.g., 1990) and Levelt’s (1989). Second, the distinction between the matrix language (ML) and the embedded language (EL) is introduced. A frequency-based criterion is suggested to operationalize the notion of the ML, which is defined as “the language of more morphemes in interaction types including intrasentential CS” (p. 68). Chapters IV and V constitute the t\vo most important chapters of the book since they present the MLF model and the predictions following from it. The MLF model is psycholinguistic in that it adopts some of the ideas from current work on speech production, such as the distinction between two kinds of morphemes: System morphemes and content