El gallego y el castellano en contacto: code-switching, convergencias y otros fenómenos de contacto entre lenguas
Galician and Spanish in contact: code-switching, convergence and other language contact phenomena

Author(s): Marta Pawlikowska
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Theoretical Linguistics
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: Galician and Spanish; code-switching; sociolinguistics; language contact phenomena
Summary/Abstract: The aim of this book is to study functions and motivations for code-switching between Galician and Castilian as we intend to explain why the speakers use the code-switching and other phenomena like transference or convergence and try to discover motivations hidden behind the usage. In order to analyse the language contact phenomena between Galician and Castilian, a linguistic corpus based on radio and television programs from Radio y Televisión Gallegas was made. These programmes include examples of free speech of language users which were required to find spontaneous samples of code-switching in order to observe languages in contact phenomena occurring naturally. The three chapters of this thesis give an approach to the current sociolinguistic situation of the Galician language, sketch the issues related to the different languages in contact with these phenomena and finally, the analysis of the examples extracted from the corpus. The first chapter focuses on the Galician language, its sociolinguistic and demographic situation, the usage of the language and the attitude of the speaker towards it. It also comments on issues related to the normalization and the normativization of Galician as well as explains the questions about spoken Galician. The second chapter focuses on the different language contact phenomena and the relation between them. The terminology and boundaries between transference, borrowing, convergence, code-mixing and code-switching can be very blurry, especially studied in the numerous researches about the given topic. Since that code-switching is the most complex of them all, the chapter is mainly about its different theories, terminology, formal aspects and research that has been conducted in other language pairs. The third and the last chapter of the thesis in the first part presents aspects of the corpus linguistics as well as formal and practical issues on creating a corpus dedicated to this research. The second part focuses on the analysis of the samples extracted from the corpus. The examples are grouped together using one of the typologies presented in the second chapter and the patterns about the code-switching usage between Galician and Castilian are sought. Moreover, the samples of other language contact phenomena are described and explained, as they appeared during the analysis of the corpus. The book is completed with its final consideration that resumes the research and highlights the day by day normality of usage of different language in contact phenomena in speech of the Galician people.

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