The relevance of structural description for analyses of bilingual talk-in-interaction: Some evidence from Serbian–English bilingual interaction

Abstract

This paper presents additional evidence for the claim that the codes which participants in a bilingual interaction juxtapose to accomplish conversational tasks need not correspond to different monolingual linguistic systems. A sequential analysis of Serbian–English bilingual interaction reveals that both transferred lexical items morphologically integrated into the base grammatical system and morphologically unintegrated transferred lexical items may be oriented to by participants as upholding the norm negotiated for the interaction or as juxtaposed to it. Examples are presented to show that morphologically integrated lexical transfers can be oriented to as locally functional by participants, in which case they are meaningful in interactional terms, and that morphologically unintegrated lexical transfers are not always oriented to by participants as juxtaposed to the negotiated norm for the interaction, in which case they are non-meaningful in interactional terms. The paper argues that the analysis of bilingual talk-in-interaction which takes account of the structural features of the phenomena it studies ensures that form does not belie meaning and enriches our understanding of how varied in terms of form code-switched utterances can be.