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