In Press. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society Bargaining in two languages: conversational functions of transactional code-switching

Introduction Studies on the pragmatic functions of code-switching, in opposition to its macro sociolinguistic significance or syntactic structure, have been largely influenced by Gumperz’s pioneering classification presented in the chapter he dedicated to this topic in his 1982 book, Discourse strategies. Many other taxonomies followed Gumperz’s initial proposal (Appel and Muysken 1987, Poplack 1988, Romaine 1989, Heller 1992) in spite of the usually claimed difficulty in interpreting and predicting the exact functions of code-switching in any given bilingual context. Their purpose has been to identify the sociopragmatic motivation for the occurrence of a particular code-switched utterance and ultimately classify it under a fixed category such as quotation, elaboration, and reiteration, among many others. However, few studies have looked at the impact of code-switching on the progress of the entire conversation together with the possible set of functions it may convey. In this sense, Auer’s (1984, 1988, 1995a, 1995b, 1998) approach to the study of bilingual conversation is one that attempts to uncover the interactional meaningfulness of codeswitching. The starting point for his sequential model is the distinction he establishes between participantvs. discourse-related language alternation. While participant-related code-switching refers to “the attributes of the speaker” (Auer 1988: 192), discourserelated code-switching is defined as “the use of code-switching to organize the conversation by contributing to the interactional meaning of a particular utterance” (Auer 1998: 4). The definition of code-switching as an organizing strategy along with the assignment of interactional value to code-switched utterances creates the needed balance between the local functions and the overall structural role of code-switching in bilingual conversation. The second important point in this approach is the consideration of codeswitching as a “contextualizing strategy” (Auer 1984: 90) similar to the ones present in monolingual conversation as initially established by Gumperz (1982). With the definition of these two guiding principles, Auer (1988, 1995b) puts forward a proposal that a sequential model, one that analyses the meaningfulness of the switched utterance in light of the episodes that come immediately before and after it, should be a particularly useful one. A different approach is the one taken by Myers-Scotton in her influential Markedness Model (1993a). She assigns an important role to the social reality of the speakers and the nature of the relationship between them for the occurrence of code-switching. Her ‘negotiation principle’ consists of the speakers switching, or not, according to the set of rights and obligations (RO) they want to maintain, establish, or challenge in a given interaction (Myers-Scotton 1993a: 113-114). Particularly relevant to this paper will be her