Bilingualism in text. Part 1. Linguistic status. Research paradigms Cover Image

Bilingwizm w tekście zapisany. Część I. Status lingwistyczny. Paradygmaty badawcze
Bilingualism in text. Part 1. Linguistic status. Research paradigms

Author(s): Bronisława Ligara
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: KSIĘGARNIA AKADEMICKA Sp. z o.o.
Keywords: bilingualism; bilingual speech; transcodic markers; bilingual competence; interpretive semantics; intracultural linguistics

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents problems related to texts that record the bilingual speech of their authors, carriers of two languages, L1 and L2. The bilingual author, while creating his or her text, drew from the verbal resources of both of his or her languages. The verbalized encounters of two codes in the text (code switching, code mixing and interference) constitute manifestations of bilingual speech. The paper is composed of two parts. The first part defines the linguistic status of texts in bilingual speech as a separate object of linguistic research. This status is determined by the presence of transcodic markers on the surface of the texts as traces of active bilingualism of their authors, and the awareness that the authors have of transgressing the standards caused by a change of language within a single text. As an object of linguistic research, texts in bilingual speech pose the question, on the one hand, of how the bilingualism of the author influences the linguistic shape of the text itself, and on the other hand, of how heterogenous elements, incompatible by nature, create a definite semantic whole, a supersign that the receiver interprets as a textual semantic unit. Study of texts in bilingual speech falls into four linguistic paradigms, which are: 1. the paradigm of intercultural communication, 2. the vision of bilingualism and linguistic contacts contained in the theoretical proposals of the Swiss school of language pedagogy and research into bilingualism (François Grosjean, Georges Lüdi, Bernard Py, and their students), 3. the paradigms which place text in the centre of linguistic research, i.e. text linguistics and discourse analysis, in view of the connection between a text that was created in the bilingual mode with the context of its creation and its interpretation, and 4. the interpretive semantics of François Rastier, together with the postulate to study each linguistic phenomenon in four descriptive orders: the syntagmatic, the paradigmatic, the hermeneutic and the referential. The theoretical-methodological framework of study of texts recorded in bilingual speech, is created by a number of research concepts suggested by these paradigms. In particular, 1. the concept of bilingual competence of a bilingual author as two verbal resources that he or she can exploit during the creation of text, 2. the concept of a bilingual person as someone who communicatively operates in two languages, 3. the concept of transcodic markers as the hyperonym for all the traces of encounters of two codes (L1 and L2) in the given text, as a result of the bilingualism of the author.

  • Issue Year: 2014
  • Issue No: 17
  • Page Range: 149-167
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: Polish