Edited by Gabriela Alboiu and Ruth King
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 360] 2022
► pp. 243–256
This chapter reports some results of an exploratory corpus study (Vogh 2018) investigating whether bilingual speakers might use code-mixing to leverage the contextualized meanings (i.e., meanings-in-use) of specific lexical resources that happen to be ‘in the other code’. A total of 206 code-mixed tokens of yeah, yes, ouais, and oui from nine videotaped oral history interviews of Franco-Americans in Maine are considered. Drawing on sociolinguistic, qualitative semantic, and discourse-analytic approaches, I find that the speakers studied do prefer different meanings-in-use for resources from their different languages, suggesting that “what speakers wish to say” (Backus 2001: 150) is indeed a relevant factor in code-mixing and in how bilingual speakers experience their bilingualism.