Insertional code-switching as interactional resource in Mandarin–English bilingual conversation

Abstract

Aims and Objectives: This study investigates the interactional relevance of insertional code-switching, that is, insertion of other-language words/phrases, in Mandarin–English bilingual conversation. It focuses on a next speaker’s (dis)alignment with an insertion in an adjacency pair and its import to the ongoing interaction. Methodology: This study adopts the framework of conversation analysis, which seeks to describe the underlying organization of talk-in-interaction. It features analyses warranted by techniques and signals in conversation that are demonstrably relevant to conversation participants. Data and Analysis: The data come from CallFriend Mandarin Corpus. Speakers are native speakers of Mandarin Chinese who resided in the United States at the time of recording. First, all instances of insertional code-switching were extracted with the extended context, filtering out those not occurring in an adjacency pair. Next, sequential analysis was conducted to examine the interactional import of a next speaker’s alignment and disalignment, respectively, when insertional code-switching occurs in an adjacency pair. Findings: This study discovers that a next speaker’s alignment with an insertion is sequentially preferred over disalignment. When different language choice over the same word occurs, speakers orient to it as problematic and then repair it, such that, alignment is achieved. Disalignment is used to claim the current speaker’s more authoritative status in the matter concerned. Originality: A large bulk of literature on insertional code-switching has focused on its syntactic constraints and semantic conditions; its interactional functions in bilingual conversation have not received as much attention. This study reveals that insertional code-switching works as an extra resource for bilingual speakers to achieve interactional alignment. Significance: This study challenges the view that insertional code-switching is not sequentially implicative by showing that it does place sequential constraints on the next speaker. It further argues that such sequential implicativeness can be exploited to establish finely calibrated alignment and index epistemic status.