In:Points of Convergence in Romance Linguistics: Papers selected from the 48th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 48), Toronto, 25-28 April 2018
Edited by Gabriela Alboiu and Ruth King
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 360] 2022
► pp. 243–256
Chapter 14Code-mixing and semantico-pragmatic resources in francophone Maine
Meanings-in-use of yeah/yes and ouais/oui
Published online: 10 March 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.360.14vog
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.360.14vog
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Approach and key terms
- 2.1Code and code-mixing
- 2.2Meaning-in-use
- 3.Corpus and context
- 3.1The corpus
- 3.2The context: Franco-Americans of Maine
- 4.Data and coding
- 4.1Identifying and selecting occurrences of code-mixing
- 4.2Coding of the selected occurrences: Categories of meaning-in-use for yeah and yes
- 5.Results and interpretation
- 6.Conclusion
Acknowledgements Notes References
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