Flagging in English-Italian code-switching
Abstract
This thesis investigates the phenomenon of flagging in code-switching. The term ‘flagging’ is normally used to describe a series of discourse phenomena occurring in the environment of a switch. In spite of a large literature on code-switching, not much is known about flagging, aside from the general assumption that it has signalling value and may draw attention to the switch (Poplack, 1988). \nThe present study aims to offer a more eclectic understanding of flagging, by looking at the phenomenon from both a structural and an interpretive perspective. The analyses are based on two small corpora of naturalistic conversations collected amongst pairs of bilingual English-Italian speakers in the UK and Italy. \nThe structural analysis looks at quantitative patterns of flagging. A relationship is observed between the frequency of an item in the data and its production with or without flagging. Higher frequency generally is related to less flagging. A similar relation holds between flagging and different grammatical categories, with nouns being less flagged than adjectives or verbs. \nThe interpretive approach adopts the methods of Conversation Analysis (Auer, 1998) and investigates how the presence of flagging is instrumental in reconstructing participants’ own understanding of the interaction. Through flagging, participants reveal to one another their orientation to single instances of language alternation as belonging or not to the medium (Gafaranga, 2000) of the conversation.…
Read the paper
Related studies
- Regulation of nucleolus assembly by non-coding RNA polymerase II transcripts
- For a Healthy Histone Code, a Little SUMO in the Tail Keeps the Acetyl Away
- Discovering a binary CTCF code with a little help from BORIS
- Article Commentary: Stabilizing the Code–-Methods to Preserve RNA Prove Their Worth
- Foreword to the Special Issue for the RINTC (The Implicit Seismic Risk of Code-Conforming Structures) Project
- Commentary: Promoting Health and Well-being in Pediatric Primary Care Settings: Using Health and Behavior Codes at Routine Well-child Visits
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.