Psycholinguistic, metalinguistic and socio–psychological accounts of code–switching: a comparative analysis of their incidence in a large Croatian–
Psycholinguistic, metalinguistic and socio–psychological accounts of code–switching: a comparative analysis of their incidence in a large Croatian–

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents examples of code–switching in a large Croatian–English corpus. Use of forms from two languages is a common feature in the speech of 100 Croatian–Australians and code–switching is a habitualised variety. Psycholinguistic and socio–psychological accounts of code–switching are examined to test their applicability and explanatory power to a sample of over 5,600 turns of which 40% contain code–switches. While some items such as proper nouns are possible triggers for psycholinguistically ’involuntary’ code–switch ing, the majority of code–switching examples are accounted within socio–psychological approaches that focus on how speakers position themselves towards others. Bilingual speech, in the context of this sample of semi–spontaneous discourse, is determined by speakers’ employment of ’other–language’ items which may signal re–positioning of roles and/or signal discourse–internal features. Code–switching into English and back to Croatian reflects speakers’ and listeners’ desired linguistic choices with the roles and discourse contexts that they are able to enact within these choices.

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