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Part of
Points of Convergence in Romance Linguistics: Papers selected from the 48th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 48), Toronto, 25-28 April 2018
Edited by Gabriela Alboiu and Ruth King
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 360] 2022
► pp. 243–256

Chapter 14
Code-mixing and semantico-pragmatic resources in francophone Maine

Meanings-in-use of yeah/yes and ouais/oui

| York University

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.

Keywords: code-mixing (code-switching), contextualized lexical semantics, meanings-in-use, bilingual speech, Franco-Americans, French in Maine
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Approach and key terms
    • 2.1Code and code-mixing
    • 2.2Meaning-in-use
  • 3.Corpus and context
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2The context: Franco-Americans of Maine
  • 4.Data and coding
    • 4.1Identifying and selecting occurrences of code-mixing
    • 4.2Coding of the selected occurrences: Categories of meaning-in-use for yeah and yes
  • 5.Results and interpretation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.360.14vog
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