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Home-comers as a source of language contact: Return Azorean emigrants’ English code-switching practices

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Published/Copyright: February 22, 2019

Abstract

The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, it seeks to highlight the potential of return emigrants — or home-comers — to introduce lexical change in their first language (L1). Second, it represents a contribution to Lusophone linguistics and Romance linguistics more broadly in examining speech performance data from home-comers of an under-researched Portuguese variety, a dialect of Azorean Portuguese. Drawing on Backus’s notion of entrenchment, I first present home-comers as a possible source of language change due to their contact with and potential use of L2 lexical items encountered abroad, and I highlight the Azores as an important yet overlooked site for language contact and change. In analyzing spontaneous oral narratives of emigration collected in the Azores, I demonstrate how home-comers’ ideological attitudes and linguistic resources serve as the ground on which linguistic changes occur. After examining the import of performance data on the individual level, I consider the status of a particular lexical category of code-switches — English discourse markers (i.e. ‘so’ and ‘you know’) — in Romance and their potential to become lexicalized and regarded as Portuguese in this particular contact situation.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank a number of individuals who supported this project in its various stages: Antes de tudo, muito obrigada a todos os terceirenses que compartilharam as suas experiencias de emigração. I also extend my sincere thanks to Milton Azevedo, Justin Davidson, Rick Kern, and Mairi McLaughlin for their helpful comments and guidance, to Lisete Ficher Medeiros for proofreading the narrative transcriptions, to the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and insightful commentaries, and to the Portuguese Studies Program (PSP) at UC Berkeley for supporting my fieldwork in Terceira.

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Published Online: 2019-02-22
Published in Print: 2019-05-27

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