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Adverb code-switching among Miami's Haitian Creole–English second generation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2010

BENJAMIN HEBBLETHWAITE
BENJAMIN HEBBLETHWAITE*
Affiliation:
University of Florida
*
*Address for correspondence: Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Florida, 301 Pugh Hall, PO Box 115565, Gainesville, FL 32611-5565, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

The findings for adverbs and adverbial phrases in a naturalistic corpus of Miami Haitian Creole–English code-switching show that one language, Haitian Creole, asymmetrically supplies the grammatical frame while the other language, English, asymmetrically supplies mixed lexical categories like adverbs. Traces of code-switching with an English frame and Haitian Creole lexical categories suggest that code-switching is abstractly BIDIRECTIONAL. A quantitative methodology that codes the language-indexation of the token in addition to the surrounding lexical items was used for all mixed (e.g. xYx/yXy, xYy/yXx, yYx/xXy) and unmixed (xXx/yYy) adverbs. Discourse position, especially the left-periphery, is found to be a significant factor in adverb code-switching. Sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic analyses which acknowledge the ‘low’ status of one language and the ‘high’ status of the other explain better the frequency of mixed English adverbs in a Haitian Creole frame and the rarity of mixed Haitian Creole adverbs in an English frame than a minimalist approach, such as MacSwan's (1999 and subsequent work), which uses phi-feature valuation and entails asymmetry without bidirectionality. While I provide confirmation for Myers-Scotton's (1993) Matrix Language Frame approach, I emphasize that trace bidirectional data need to be accounted for by a theory that is grounded in the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic realities.

Keywords

adverbs in Haitian Creole–English code-switchingasymmetry and bidirectionalityMatrix Language Frame compared with minimalismlexical and functional categories in bilingual syntax
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 409 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Carmen Silva-Corvalán, Ewa Jaworska, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on and corrections to this article. Their constructive criticism and careful editing greatly improved this paper. I would also like to thank Carol Myers-Scotton and Margaret Deuchar for their correspondence, comments and encouragement. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Barbara Vance, Julie Auger, Laurent Dekydtspotter, Kevin Rottet, and Albert Valdman who helped lay a foundation for this research. All errors are my own.

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