Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
Vol. 3:2 (2015) ► pp.289–316

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

A case study of a Korean-American family’s code switching during conflict-related interaction

 | Rutgers University
 | Graduate School of Education
Published online: 31 December 2015
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.3.2.03flo
The study explores how code switching (CS) manifests itself in adversarial episodes during meal time. In particular, it examines how CS emerges among members of a Korean American family as they wrangle, dispute, and argue in this intimate discursive setting. Several researchers have examined how arguments and disputes among children are realized (e.g., Boggs 1978; Brenneis and Lein 1977; Corsaro and Rizzo 1990; Eisenberg and Garvey 1981). Nonetheless, little is known about how bilingual children and their parents employ CS as a negotiating tool in conflict-related interactions. Among the findings, the study reveals that CS is manifested in the parents and children in slightly different ways although the family members skillfully maneuver the use of two languages and registers. The study uncovers how CS was employed as a strategy to attempt to achieve goals and how it intersected with stance taking. In general, CS also emerged as a discursive strategy that the interlocutors employed to explicate, challenge, mitigate, hedge, and plead during these episodes.
References (62)
. 1995. “The Pragmatics of Code-Switching: A Sequential Approach.” In One Speaker, Two Languages, ed. by Lesley Milroy, and Pieter Muysken, 114–135. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1997. Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse. New Jersey: Erlbaum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boggs, Stephen T. 1978. “The Development of Verbal Disputing in Part-Hawaiian Children.” Language in Society 71: 325–344. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brenneis, Donald, and Laura Lein. 1977. “You Fruithead: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Children’s Dispute Settlement.” In Child Discourse, ed. by Susan Ervin-Tripp, and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, 49–65. New York: Academic Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Briz, Antonio. 2004. “La cortesía verbal codificada y cortesía verbal interpretada en la conversación.” In Pragmática sociocultural: Estudios sobre el discurso de la cortesía en español, ed. by Diana Bravo, and Antonio Briz, 67–92. Madrid: Ariel.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bullock, Barbara E., and Almeida J. Toribio. 2009. “Themes in the Study of Code-Switching.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching, ed. by Barbara. E. Bullock, and Almeida J. Toribio, 1–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cashman, Holly. 2005. “Identities at Play: Language Preference and Group Membership in Bilingual Talk in Interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 371: 301–315. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chung, Haesook Han. 2006. “Code Switching as a Communicative Strategy: A Case Study of Korean-English Bilinguals.” Bilingual Research Journal 30(2): 293–307. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corsaro, William A., and Thomas Rizzo. 1990. “Disputes in the Peer Culture of American and Italian Nursery School Children.” In Conflict Talk: Sociolinguistic Investigations in Conversation, ed. by Allen Grimshaw, 21–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cromdal, Jakob. 2004. “Building Bilingual Oppositions: Code-Switching in Children’s Disputes.” Language in Society 331: 33–58. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Houwer, Annick. 1995. “Bilingual Language Acquisition.” In The Handbook of Child Language, ed. by Paul Fletcher, and Brian MacWhinney, 219–250. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dersley, Ian, and Anthony Wootton. 2001. “In the Heat of the Sequence: Interactional Features Preceding Walkouts from Argumentative Talk.” Language in Society 301: 611–638. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Du Bois, John. 2007. The Stance Triangle. In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, ed. by Robert Englebretson, 139–182. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eisenberg, Anne R., and Catherine Garvey. 1981. “Children’s Use of Verbal Strategies in Resolving Conflicts.” Discourse Processes 41: 149–170. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Faulstich Orellana, Marjorie, and Jennifer Reynolds. 2008. “Cultural Modeling: Leveraging Bilingual Skills for School Paraphrasing Tasks.” Reading Research Quarterly 43(1): 48–65. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fishman, Joshua. 1965. “Language Maintenance and Language Shift: The American Immigrant Case within a General Theoretical Perspective.” Sociologus 16(1): 19–39.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gafaranga, Joseph. 2005. “Demythologising Language Alternation Studies: Conversational Structure vs. Social Structure in Bilingual Interaction”. Journal of Pragmatics 37(3): 281–300. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. “The Conversation Analytic Model of Code-Switching.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching, ed. by Barbara. E. Bullock, and Almeida J. Toribio, 114–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gardner-Chloros, Penelope. 2009. “Sociolinguistic Factors in Code-Switching.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching, ed. by Barbara. E. Bullock, and Almeida J. Toribio, 97–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gumperz, John J. 1982a. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1982b. Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heller, Monica, ed. 1988. Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hopewell, Susan. 2011. “Leveraging Bilingualism to Accelerate English Reading Comprehension.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 14(5): 603–620. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hua, Zhu. 2008. “Dueling Languages, Dueling Values: Codeswitching in Bilingual Intergenerational Conflict Talk in Diasporic Families.” Journal of Pragmatics 401: 1799–1816. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail. 1989. “Notes on a Possible Metric which Provides for a ‘Standard Maximum Silence’ of One Second in Conversation.” In Conversation, ed. by Derek Roger, and Peter Bull, 166–196. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kang, Agnes. 2003. “Negotiating Conflict within the Constraints of Social Hierarchies in Korean-American Discourse.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 71: 299–320. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kendall, Shari. 2007. “Introduction: Family Talk.” In Family Talk: Discourses and Identities in Four American Families, ed. by Deborah Tannen, Shari Kendall, and Cynthia Gordon, 3–23. London: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kim, Sharon. 2010. “Shifting Boundaries within Second-Generation Korean American Churches.” Sociology of Religion 71(1): 98–122. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labov, William, and David Fanshel. 1977. Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy as Conversation. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lanza, Elizabeth, and Bente Svenson. 1997. “Tell Me Who Your Friends Are and I Might be Able to Tell You What Language(s) You Speak: Social Network Analysis, Multilingualism, and Identity.” International Journal of Bilingualism 11(3): 275–300. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Li, Wei. 1994. Three Generations, Two Languages, One Family: Language Choice and Language Shift in a Chinese Community in Britain. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. “The ‘Why’ and ‘How’ Questions in the Analysis of Conversational Code-Switching.” In Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity, ed. by Peter Auer, 156–179. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. “‘How Can You Tell?’ Towards a Common Sense Explanation of Conversational Code-Switching.” Journal of Pragmatics 371: 375–389. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maynard, Douglas. 1985. “How Children Start Arguments.” Language in Society 141: 1–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol. 1990. “Intersections between Social Motivations and Structural Processing in Code-Switching.” In Papers for the Workshop on Constraints, Conditions, and Models , 57–82. September 27–29. Strasbourg: European Science Foundation.
. 1993. Dueling Languages: Grammatical Structures in Code Switching. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1999. “Explaining the Role of Norms and Rationality in Codeswitching.” Journal of Pragmatics 321: 1259–1271. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nishimura, Miwa. 1995. “A Functional Analysis of Japanese-English Code-Switching.” Journal of Pragmatics 231: 157–181. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana. 1978. “Dialect Acquisition among Puerto Rican Bilinguals.” Language in Society 71: 89–103. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1980. “Sometimes I’ll Start a Sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL: Toward a Typology of Code-Switching.” Linguistics 18(7–8): 581–618. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1981. “Syntactic Structure and Social Function of Code Switching.” In Latino Language and Communicative Behavior, ed. by Richard P. Durán, 169–184. New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corp.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Potowski, Kim. 2013. “Language Maintenance and Shift.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. by Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, and Ceil Lucas, 321–339. UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Romaine, Suzanne. 1995. Bilingualism. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rumbaut, Rubén. 2004. “Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the Immigrant First and Second Generations in the United States.” International Migration Review 38(3): 1160–1205. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sánchez, Rosaura. 1983. Chicano Discourse. Rowley: Newbury House.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schieffelin, Bambi. 1994. “Code-Switching and Language Socialization: Some Probable Relationships.” In Pragmatics: From Theory to Practice, ed. by Lynne E. Hewett, Rae M. Sonnenmeier, and Judith F. Duchan, 20–42. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shin, Sun-Young. 2010. “The Functions of Code-Switching in a Korean Sunday School.” Heritage Language Journal 71: 91–116.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shin, Sarah, and Lesley Milroy. 2000. “Conversational Codeswitching Among Korean-English Bilingual Children.” International Journal of Bilingualism 3(4): 351–383. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Song, Juyoung. 2009. “Bilingual Creativity and Self-Negotiation.” In Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America, ed. by Angelica Reyes, and Adrienne Lo, 309–324. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah. 2005. Conversational Style. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
ten Have, Paul. 2007. Doing Conversation Analysis. 2nd edition. London: Sage Publications. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Torras, María-Carme, and Joseph Gafaranga. 2002. “Social Identities and Language Alternation in Non-Formal Institutional Bilingual Talk: Trilingual Service Encounters in Barcelona.” Language in Society 311: 527–548. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Valdés Fallis, Guadalupe. 1976. “Social Interaction and Code-Switching Patterns: A Case Study of Spanish/English Alternation.” In Bilingualism in the Bicentennial and Beyond, ed. by Gary D. Keller, Richard V. Teschner, and Silvia Viera, 53–85. New York: Bilingual Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Williams, Ashley. 2005. “Fight Words and Challenging Expectation: Language Alternation and Social Roles in Family Dispute.” Journal of Pragmatics 371: 317–328. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yun, Seongwoon. 2008. “Role-play and Language Socialization among Bilingual Korean Children in the United States.” Simulation and Gaming 391: 240–252. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zentella, Ana Celia. 1981. “Ta bien, you could answer me en cualquier idioma: Puerto Rican Codeswitching in Bilingual Classrooms.” In Latino Language and Communicative Behavior, ed. by Richard P. Duran, 109–132. New Jersey: Ablex Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1997. Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Badarneh, Muhammad A., Kawakib Al-Momani & Fathi Migdadi
2017. Performing acts of impoliteness through code-switching to English in colloquial Jordanian Arabic interactions. Pragmatics and Society 8:4 ► pp. 571 ff. DOI logo
Badarneh, Muhammad A., Kawakib Al-Momani & Fathi Migdadi
2017. Performing acts of impoliteness through code-switching to English in colloquial Jordanian Arabic interactions. Pragmatics and Society 8:3 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue