Models for Describing Languages in Contact (Bilingualism) and Research Questions Guiding the Study

This study of Spanish English language contact primarily refers to Myers-Scotton’s models (Markedness model, Matrix Language-Frame model, 4-Morpheme model) with additional reference to other language models and language contact research (Poplack, Sankoff, Pfaff, Lipski, Muysken, and others). In the Markedness model the “unmarked” language is associated with the social norm or the status quo in a given conversation. Choosing to speak a “marked” language marks a shift away from the social norm or the status quo. Code-switching languages in a conversation constitutes different social statements between interlocutors, depending on the markedness of each language in the context of the conversation and in relation to the interlocutors. The Matrix Language-Frame model states that code-switching within a sentence is asymmetrical, that in each sentence using two languages there is a matrix or main language and a subordinate or embedded language. The 4-Morpheme model claims that every language has four basic types of morphemes; content or lexical morphemes such as root words carry the informational content of a sentence and three different types of grammatical or system morphemes accompany content morphemes in order to either add more information to content morphemes such as plural affixes on nouns or verb inflections which link for example subjects and predicates. In a code-switched sentence content morphemes and one type of system morphemes are those embedded from one language into a matrix language sentence of another language. These three models can together help to explain the patterns of code-switching and other forms of language mixing within sentences and conversations.