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Chapter 14. Code-mixing and semantico-pragmatic resources in francophone Maine

Meanings-in-use of yeah/yes and ouais/oui
  • Kendall Vogh
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Points of Convergence in Romance Linguistics
This chapter is in the book Points of Convergence in Romance Linguistics

Abstract

This chapter reports some results of an exploratory corpus study (Vogh 2018) investigating whether bilingual speakers might use code-mixing to leverage the contextualized meanings (i.e., meanings-in-use) of specific lexical resources that happen to be ‘in the other code’. A total of 206 code-mixed tokens of yeah, yes, ouais, and oui from nine videotaped oral history interviews of Franco-Americans in Maine are considered. Drawing on sociolinguistic, qualitative semantic, and discourse-analytic approaches, I find that the speakers studied do prefer different meanings-in-use for resources from their different languages, suggesting that “what speakers wish to say” (Backus 2001: 150) is indeed a relevant factor in code-mixing and in how bilingual speakers experience their bilingualism.

Abstract

This chapter reports some results of an exploratory corpus study (Vogh 2018) investigating whether bilingual speakers might use code-mixing to leverage the contextualized meanings (i.e., meanings-in-use) of specific lexical resources that happen to be ‘in the other code’. A total of 206 code-mixed tokens of yeah, yes, ouais, and oui from nine videotaped oral history interviews of Franco-Americans in Maine are considered. Drawing on sociolinguistic, qualitative semantic, and discourse-analytic approaches, I find that the speakers studied do prefer different meanings-in-use for resources from their different languages, suggesting that “what speakers wish to say” (Backus 2001: 150) is indeed a relevant factor in code-mixing and in how bilingual speakers experience their bilingualism.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Introduction 1
  5. A. Interfaces
  6. Chapter 1. Picard subject clitics 11
  7. Chapter 2. A child’s view of Romance modification 35
  8. Chapter 3. Definite determiners in Romance 57
  9. B. Bridging issues at the CP-TP-vP levels
  10. Chapter 4. Differential object marking, oblique morphology, and enriched case hierarchies 81
  11. Chapter 5. A deletion account of referential null objects in Basque Spanish 97
  12. Chapter 6. Same EPP, different null subject type 111
  13. Chapter 7. On (un)grammatical sequences of se s in Spanish 127
  14. Chapter 8. On the interpretation of the Spanish 1st person plural pronoun 143
  15. C. Bridging issues at the PP-DP levels
  16. Chapter 9. French ne … que exceptives in prepositional contexts 163
  17. Chapter 10. Interpreting reduplicated numerals in Old Ibero-Romance 177
  18. Chapter 11. Value and cardinality in the evaluation of bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese 193
  19. Chapter 12. Formality by distance in Spanish and Catalan 207
  20. D. Bridging issues in linguistics
  21. Chapter 13. Cyclical change in affixal negation 225
  22. Chapter 14. Code-mixing and semantico-pragmatic resources in francophone Maine 243
  23. Chapter 15. Exceptionality and ungrammaticality in Spanish stress 257
  24. Index 273
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.360.14vog

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. Introduction 1
  5. A. Interfaces
  6. Chapter 1. Picard subject clitics 11
  7. Chapter 2. A child’s view of Romance modification 35
  8. Chapter 3. Definite determiners in Romance 57
  9. B. Bridging issues at the CP-TP-vP levels
  10. Chapter 4. Differential object marking, oblique morphology, and enriched case hierarchies 81
  11. Chapter 5. A deletion account of referential null objects in Basque Spanish 97
  12. Chapter 6. Same EPP, different null subject type 111
  13. Chapter 7. On (un)grammatical sequences of se s in Spanish 127
  14. Chapter 8. On the interpretation of the Spanish 1st person plural pronoun 143
  15. C. Bridging issues at the PP-DP levels
  16. Chapter 9. French ne … que exceptives in prepositional contexts 163
  17. Chapter 10. Interpreting reduplicated numerals in Old Ibero-Romance 177
  18. Chapter 11. Value and cardinality in the evaluation of bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese 193
  19. Chapter 12. Formality by distance in Spanish and Catalan 207
  20. D. Bridging issues in linguistics
  21. Chapter 13. Cyclical change in affixal negation 225
  22. Chapter 14. Code-mixing and semantico-pragmatic resources in francophone Maine 243
  23. Chapter 15. Exceptionality and ungrammaticality in Spanish stress 257
  24. Index 273
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