ABSTRACT
Th
is research aims at investigating the occurrence of code-switching in the
speech of a late bilingual subject, under sociolinguistic and psychol
inguistic
perspectives. Code-switching or code alternation is a communicative strategy
used by bilingual speakers in a given social situation. The word “bilingual”
primarily describes someone who is proficient in two languages. This term can,
however, also include the many people in the world who have varying degrees
of proficiency in three, four or even more languages simultaneously (Wei, 2000)
Adopting the parameters of qualitative research, we have done a case study of
a 39-year-old Nigerian male bilingual who has lived in Brazil for about 6 years
working as an English teacher and is married to a Brazilian. The data was
collected by means of five different instruments: audio and video recording of
an oral presentation of the subject to a group of students in a Brazilian school
in a bilingual context (English/Portuguese), followed by an interview session; a
closed individual interview recorded on audio tape, made by means of discrete
questions; a written questionnaire in order to collect some pers
onal data about
the subject; a visual perception test to detect the preferential language in a free
speech context; and an auto-confrontation or reflexive interview. Only the
passages where the code-switching phenomenon occured were transcribed
and analyzed. Some sentences of this
corpus
were selected for acoustic
analysis and some charts of duration and F0 measures were made to analyze
some prosody aspects of the native speaker when speaking the first language
and the second language. The final results indicate that: (1) although the
subject prefers the mother tongue (English), code-switching occurs in both
ways: first language – second language / second language – first-
tongue
language; (2) the data analyses suggest that the subject uses different
strategies for choosing lexical items, according to the context, the interlocutor,
and the place, and that the change of the linguistic code appears most of the
time initiated by the “OK” interjection. The emotional aspect is also worth
mentioning: the subject is always worried about the interlocutor and wants to
know whether he has made himself clear. The pronunciation of Portuguese
words are heavily influenced by his first language; (3) we could observe, from
the acoustic analyses , that the intonation curve of the yes/no questions
produced in English bears much resemblance to English melodic patterning in
that the subject keeps the the intonational aspects of the matrix language; (4)
there is considerable alteration in the fonotaxe of some words used by the
speaker; (5) the altered lexical item is replaced by words belonging to the same
syntactic level.
Key
-words: code-switching, bilingualism, late bilingual, linguistic strategies,
speech variation, prosody alteration, matrixlanguage, acousti
c phonetics.