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Part of
Responding to Polar Questions across Languages and Contexts
Edited by Galina B. Bolden, John Heritage and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 35] 2023
► pp. 239–271

Chapter 8
Code-switching, agency, and the answer possibility space of Spanish-English bilinguals

| University of Colorado Boulder

The present study addresses the implicit monolingual bias in our understanding of polar question-answer sequences by examining them in bilingual conversation. Drawing upon a corpus of naturally-occurring conversational data amongst native Spanish-English bilinguals in the southwestern United States, I target and explore the ‘fit’ between polar questions and answers in this community of practice. In this report, I focus specifically on the dimension of language (non-)concordance between particle answers and the questions they address. Evidence is offered that speakers produce response particles that are concordant with the language of the question as the pragmatically unmarked answer format, whereas response particles that are non-concordant with the language of the question (i.e., ‘code-switched’) are marked, produced agentively and for cause, routinely indexing an emergent stance that is at variance with the terms established by the question. Some possible avenues for future comparative work on the expression of agency in question-answer sequences are explored in the Conclusion.

Keywords: code-switching, bilingualism, agency, polar questions, answers, conversation analysis, English, Spanish (in the U.S.), heritage speakers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data & methods
  • 3.The bilingual answer possibility space
    • 3.1Language concordance vs. non-concordance
    • 3.2Language-concordant particles
    • 3.3Language-non-concordant particles
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.35.08ray
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