111Factors Infl uencing
Code-Switching
1
M. Carmen Parafi ta Couto, Peredur Davies,
Diana Carter and Margaret Deuchar
Introduction
In this chapter, we present the results of a study that was inspired by an
interest in the regularities and differences that underlie language choice in
bilingual speech. In particular, we focus on naturalistic data from two bilin-
gual corpora (Welsh-English and Spanish-English) collected using similar
methodologies in Wales (UK) and in Miami (Florida, USA).
We use the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model (Myers-Scotton, 2002)
as a means of classifying and comparing the code-switching (CS) patterns
found in our data. CS is defined as in Chapter 5 as follows: ‘an activity which
may be observed in the speech of bilinguals who go back and forth between
their two languages in the same conversation’. This model allows us to iden-
tify the language that provides the morphosyntactic frame – that is the
underlying grammatical pattern – of each bilingual clause produced by a
given speaker. The morphosyntactic frame is determined by the language of
the finite verb and the relative order of the verb and the subject within the
clause, and this is what constitutes the ‘matrix’ language. In this chapter we
seek to address the question of why there is overwhelming uniformity in the
choice of this matrix language in our Welsh-English data compared with
variation in our Spanish-English data.
We draw on two approaches to language variation to throw light on the
factors which may be related to this variation vs. uniformity in CS patterns.
The first approach is represented by the Labovian tradition, which examines
the relation between extra-linguistic and linguistic variables within a given
speech community, in order to establish what factors help to determine lin-
guistic choices by speakers in those communities. The other approach, which
we could broadly label anthropological, compares the speech of contrasting
communities and tries to relate the differences between them to divergence