Essay On Code Switching

According to Gumperz, code switching is defined as “the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems.” Many people believe that most code switching occurs at random or without pragmatic significance (Poplack, 1985), while others believe that every case of code switching has some significance to it (McConvell, 1988). Gumperz is somewhere in the middle, saying that “just because code-switching conveys information, does not mean that every switch can be assigned a single meaning” (Muñoa Barredo, 1997; 529). With this approach in mind, I examined the transcript of the conversation between Mary and Paul for any significance in the switches that were made between

This recount can also be expressed in a single language, but it is not as obvious, for example, “This is the bakery that we came to when we first started dating.” In this sentence, from the word “that” and onward the speaker is talking about something that happened in the past and provokes the listener’s mind to flashback to when the speaker first started dating. The same thing occurs here but in a more abstract sense. From the word “que” and onward, the listener is encouraged to imagine what could have been in this instance, instead of what actually was like in the example. Mary could have come up with different reasons to stop smoking, such as it affects her health, etc. She could have thought, “I’m going to stop smoking because it’s bad for me,” some time in the past. This is why she switches to Spanish, because her reasoning back then if she had taken into account the risks of smoking would have been in Spanish, the language that is most influential and emotionally connected to