Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikastudien), course: Bilingualismus, language: English, abstract: In today's globalized world bilingualism, defined as the regular use of two or more languages, is a widespread phenomenon and has become nearly the standard and monolingualism the exception. Consequently linguists have become more and more interested in this topic and in the last decades much has been published regarding bilinguals and their language behavior. Being able to manage two different languages or dialects, bilinguals are capable to code-switch within their languages. Code-Switching (in the following referred to as CS) occurs when a word or a phrase in one language substitutes for a word or phrase in a second language. "Code switching is the alternate use of two (or more) languages within the same utterance, as illustrated in (1) (Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio, 1994). (1a) This morning mi hermano y yo fuimos a comprar some milk. This morning my brother and I went to buy some milk. (1b) The student brought the homework para la profesora. The student brought the homework for the teacher." CS follows functional and grammatical principles and is a complex, rule-governed phenomenon. Bilingual speakers often code-switch from one language to another, especially when both languages are used in the environment. This is mostly the case in multilingual communities. Although much has already been written on how bilinguals organize their two languages, little is known about why bilinguals mix their two languages during communicative process. It would be easier for them just to stay in one language while communicating, being understood by everyone. Nevertheless they switch codes during conversations. This raises the question: Why do bilinguals code-switch? The aim of this annotated bibliography is to shed some

This book addresses the issue of language contact in the context of child language acquisition. Elizabeth Lanza examines in detail the simultaneous acquisition of Norwegian and English by two first-born children in families living in Norway in which the mother is American and the father Norwegian. She connects psycholinguistic arguments with sociolinguistic evidence, adding a much-needed dimension of real language-use in context to the psycholinguistic studies which have dominated the field. She draws upon evidence from other studies to support her claims concerning language dominance and the child's differentiation between the two languages in relation to the situation, interlocutor, and the communicative demands of the context. She also addresses the question of whether or not the language mixing of infant bilingualism is conceptually different from the codeswitching of older bilinguals, thus helping to bridge the gap between these two fields of study.

This volume demonstrates that mixed utterances in young bilinguals can be analyzed in the same way as adult code-switching. It provides new insights not only in the field of code-switching and of language mixing in young bilinguals, but also in issues concerning general questions on linguistic theory which are difficult to be answered with monolingual data.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.3, University of Stuttgart (Institut für Linguistik), 40 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The aim of this paper is to provide a complete overview over the phenomenon of code-switching and code-mixing. The history of the research of code change has undergone various periods that have shown how complex the phenomenon of codeswitching and code-mixing are. In the course of research of code change it has become clear that code-switching and code-mixing can be investigated from different perspectives. Researchers focused on code change after they had realized that linguistic forms and practices are interrelated. And code-switching/-mixing, in their turn, embodies not only variation, but the link between linguistic form and language use as social practice. Research from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective has focused on understanding the nature of the systematic of code change, as a way of revealing linguistic and potentially cognitive processes. Research on the psychological and social dimensions of code-switching/-mixing has largely been devoted to answering the questions of why speakers code change and what the social meaning of code change is for them. The sociological perspective later goes on to attempt to use the answer to those questions to illuminate how language operates as a social process. Throughout the history of research on code-switching/-mixing it has been proposed that it is necessary to link all these forms of analysis and that, indeed, it is that possibility that is one of the most compelling reasons for studying code-switching/- mixing, since such a link would permit the development and verification of hypotheses regarding the relationship among linguistic, cognitive and social processes in a more general way (Heller, Pfaff 1996). As with any aspect of language contact phenomena, research on code- switching

This book provides an in depth analysis of the different ways in which bilingual speakers switch from one language to another in the course of conversation. This phenomenon, known as code-mixing or code-switching, takes many forms. Pieter Muysken adopts a comparative approach to distinguish between the different types of code-mixing, drawing on a wealth of data from bilingual settings throughout the world. His study identifies three fundamental and distinct patterns of mixing - 'insertion', 'alternation' and 'congruent lexicalization' - and sets out to discover whether the choice of a particular mixing strategy depends on the contrasting grammatical properties of the languages involved, the degree of bilingual competence of the speaker or various social factors. The book synthesizes a vast array of recent research in a rapidly growing field of study which has much to reveal about the structure and function of language.

This practical and reassuring guide will enable readers to make informed decisions about how to raise their child bilingually.