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

Abstract

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.