Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Lestrade, P. J.

Date of Degree

12-9-2006

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Foreign Languages

Degree Name

Master of Arts

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Foreign Languages (historic)

Abstract

This sociolinguistic study of the bilingual speech of Spanish immigrants in Toulouse, France focuses on the phenomenon of code-switching (CS). The analysis of the data showed that most CS was situational, rather than metaphorical. Three types of CS were found: insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalization. Their examination revealed that the insertion of French words was more common than of Spanish items, the alternation was most frequent in repetitions, and the congruent lexicalization was present at the grammatical and structural level. The speech of the individual participants was also analyzed, and it was found that the sociological aspects greatly affected the use of CS. Finally, the analysis of the frequency effects was conducted revealing that the topic of the nouns influenced the language in which the nouns were used. The results proved that it is impossible to conduct a reliable grammatical analysis without including the sociolinguistic aspects.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/17495

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