Testing the 4-M model: An introduction

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The goal of this special issue is to report on new directions in our research that began with codeswitching, but increasingly includes other types of language contact phenomena. The issue consists of articles by the junior members of our research team and reports on their analyses and explanations for a variety of outcomes in bilingual production. Their approaches rely on the principles laid down in Duelling Languages (Myers-Scotton, 1993 [1997]). That is, their research looks for answers at an abstract level. Just like monolingual speech, bilingual speech is not best explainable only in terms of surface configurations. Duelling Languages presents an innovative model of structural constraints on codeswitching to explain the differential contributions of the participating languages in codeswitching. These constraints refer to the Matrix Language (ML) versus Embedded Language (EL) opposition and the content versus system morpheme opposition. Using these two oppositions, the model accounts for the bilingual structures observed in codeswitching data produced by proficient bilinguals. In addition to explicating the data in Duelling Languages, the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model also accounts for the bilingual constituents from such diverse language pairs such as Turkish/Dutch (Backus, 1996), Chinese/English (Wei, 1999), Hungarian/English (Bolonyai, 1998), Arabic/English (Jake & Myers-Scotton, 1997), Spanish/English and Italian/Swiss German (Myers-Scotton & Jake, 1998b), and Mandinka, Wolof/English (Haust, 1995). The MLF model was based largely on what Myers-Scotton and Jake have since termed “classic codeswitching,” that is, codeswitching by speakers proficient enough in all participating varieties that they could engage in monolingual discourse in any of them. In Section 2 below, we offer readers