Spanish/English codeswitching in published work represents a claim to the right to participate in the marketplace on a bilingual and not just monolingual basis. This book offers a syntactic and sociolinguistic analysis of the codeswitching in a corpus of thirty texts: novels and short stories published in the United States by twenty-four authors between 1970-2000. An application of the Matrix Language Frame model shows that written codeswitching follows for the most part the same syntactic patterns as its spoken counterpart. The reasons why some written codeswitching is considered to be artificial or inauthentic are examined. An overview of written codeswitching research is given, including titles of many texts in addition to the corpus that contain codeswitching between diverse languages. The book concludes with a look at how codeswitching is used by writers to attain their objectives, and what the implications may be for the relative positions of Spanish, English, and Spanish/English codeswitching in the United States.

Table of contents

Introduction 1 1. Codeswitching: Form and function 5 2. The texts: From single word switches to every other phrase 25 3. A grammatical and discourse function analysis 47 4. Written codeswitching and codeswitching in nonprint media 81 5. Written codeswitching: Writers, readers, and speakers 99 5. A sociolinguistic mirror 121 6. The costs of codeswitching 137 References 147 Appendices 165 Index of names 171 Index of subjects 177