Normes, idiosyncrasies et exceptions dans la conversation bilingue : variation et invariant

Résumé 0

This article looks at how bilingual speakers switch languages within their communities, in an attempt at determining whether certain norms emerge — whether they be group-dependent or not —, or if the production of code-switched utterances happens on a case-by-case basis. Can a quantifiable measure of invariance be found in a phenomenon that is at its core defined by variation from the (monolingual) norm ? Or is it shaped by how speakers in a given group interact with one another ? In order to answer this question, we performed a comparative analysis of two bilingual corpora, from which two tendencies emerge. First, our statistics show that in the majority of cases, not only can the same bilingual phenomena be found in both our corpora, they also appear at extremely similar frequencies. Second, the numbers show that approximately a quarter of bilingual phenomena are different across our corpora, which would seem to show that at least some of them do depend on the group in which they appear. In our conclusion we put forward the theory that these bilingual phenomena can be better explained if the discursive purpose of code-switching is taken into account, i.e. the creation of a message that is optimally easy and fast both to produce for the speaker and to understand for the listener.