Structures of multilingual code-switching among Arubans living in the Netherlands.

Abstract

This thesis looks at how Aruban students living in the Netherlands engage in multilingual discourse by looking at code-switching patterns focusing on the pragmatic and syntactic environment of the code-switching. Participants were recorded in two conversational contexts, formal and informal, to examine (1) which languages appeared in both contexts, (2) the structure of sentences containing code-switches, (3) whether Poplack’s (1980) syntactic code-switching constraints held true for the present dataset, and (4) in what environment code-switches not accounted for by Poplack’s (1980) constraints occur. To gain meaningful insights into the present data, next to the two constraints ten additional ‘linguistic-tags’ were used to code instances of code-switching, namely: discourse marker, affective aspect, idiom, lexical borrowing, quotation, processing cue, loanword, loan translation, derivation and compound. Results show that speakers use all languages in their repertoire and favoured intrasentential code-switching. Poplack’s (1980) syntactic constraints held true for a few instances of code-switching in this study, but not to the extent as it did for Puerto Rican Spanish and Chicano Spanish data. The findings of the present study are a good indication for further research on the topic.