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Title:
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Code Switching and Co-Membership Claims on a Bimanese Radio Talk Show
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Author:
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Kamaludin Yusra
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Macquarie University
, School of English, Linguistics and Media
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Degree Date:
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1998
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Sociolinguistics
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Subject Language(s):
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Bima
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Director(s):
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Christian Kay
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Abstract:
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Code switching is the most widely studied aspect in language contact situations. Some studies have concentrated on the psycholinguistic aspects of the mental lexicon of bilingual speakers, while others have described the so-called syntactic constraints of code switching. Most studies, however, are concerned with code switching as an actual bilingual language use in multilingual encounters and its claimed sociolinguistic functions. This study intends to combine both the linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects. This combination is in order to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic and sociolinguistic dimensions of code switching, especially how it relates to solidarity in intergroup encounters.
Data under investigation were taken from tape recorded conversations of agricultural engineers in their attempts to convey agricultural information to peasant group audiences. Because the engineers and peasant groups are from the same ethnic group and speak the same native, ethnic language, there is no reason to code switch from Bimanese to the Javanese-dominated Bahasa Indonesia. However, code switching is quite dominant and has even been used as a primary strategy for the engineers' claims for solidarity and co-membership with the target audiences. Analyses of the data required the hosts' retrospection to their tape-recorded code switching. This retrospection was done to ensure a valid and more reliable interpretation of code switching phenomena. Data analyses followed four steps: (1) identification of code switching based on the differences between Bimanese and Bahasa Indonesia in their phonological and morphological aspects, (2) classification of code switching following Poplack's(1980) surface structure taxonomy, (3) description of code switching based on the sociolinguistic functions of each linguistic type of code switching, and (4) explanation of code switching describing how code switching is used as a sole strategy for solidarity and co-membership.
The study finds that (1) intra-sentential switching is the most frequent linguistic type of code switching, (2) nouns appear to be the linguistic items which are most code alternated, (3) syntactic constraints of code switching appear to be violated, (4) code switching also functions as an emphasis in personal propositions, as well as for claiming solidarity, (5) even though in the majority it is unmarked, code switching as a solidarity-making strategy conveys implied metaphorical and socio-pragmatic meanings in its metalinguistic comments, which usually accompany code-alternated terms. By such comments, bilingual speakers imply certain meanings (e.g. self-exclusion, self-inclusion) in order to achieve solidarity and co-membership. In this latter case, code switching has become an emotional cement between the two groups.
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