Spanish/English Codeswitching in a Written Corpus

Book excerpt: Spanish/English codeswitching in published work represents a claim to the right to participate in the marketplace on a bilingual and not just monolingual basis. This book offers a syntactic and sociolinguistic analysis of the codeswitching in a corpus of thirty texts: novels and short stories published in the United States by twenty-four authors between 1970-2000. An application of the Matrix Language Frame model shows that written codeswitching follows for the most part the same syntactic patterns as its spoken counterpart. The reasons why some written codeswitching is considered to be artificial or inauthentic are examined. An overview of written codeswitching research is given, including titles of many texts in addition to the corpus that contain codeswitching between diverse languages. The book concludes with a look at how codeswitching is used by writers to attain their objectives, and what the implications may be for the relative positions of Spanish, English, and Spanish/English codeswitching in the United States.