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" Multilingualism in Tunisia and French/Arabic code-switching among educated Tunisian bilinguals "
Belazi, Hedi Mohammad
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1103976
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| Doc. No
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TLpq303897888
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| Main Entry
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Belazi, Hedi Mohammad
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| Title & Author
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Multilingualism in Tunisia and French/Arabic code-switching among educated Tunisian bilinguals\ Belazi, Hedi Mohammad
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| College
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Cornell University
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| Date
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1991
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| student score
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1991
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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187-187 p.
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| Abstract
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The Tunisian speech community is characterized by both diglossia and bilingualism. The existence of these two sociolinguistic phenomena has led to the emergence of intermediate codes, Educated Tunisian Arabic and Franco-Arabe, a mixture of French and Tunisian Arabic. The focus of this thesis is Franco-Arabe, used mainly by educated Tunisian bilinguals. It is an exemplar of code switching, i.e. the constant rapid alternation between two languages in the same unit of discourse. This phenomenon, common in multilingual settings, has important implications for sociolinguistics and linguistics. Since not only the functions served by switching from one code to another related to questions of prestige, social status, language attitudes and topic, but far from being a random operation, code switching is governed by strict syntactic constraints determining where a speaker may or may not switch from one language to another. However, few studies have been done on code switching between French and Arabic despite its extensive use among educated French-Arabic bilinguals and its important consequences on language maintenance, language change and language policy. The approach in this study was two-pronged, utilizing both an extensive field corpus and tests such as Matched Guise and judgement tasks. This thesis shows that, apart from the diglossic relationship between MSA and TA, the functional roles played by French and Arabic in the community, and the values Tunisians attach to each one correlate well with their actual usage of code switching. It also demonstrates that code switching is rule-governed and can be accounted for in a principled manner, avoiding ad-hoc rules and taxonomic accounts. Making use of the distinction between functional and lexical categories made by Abney (1987), Fukui (1987) and Bowers (1989), two general principles are posited to account for the grammar of code switching among Tunisian bilinguals: (1) The Functional Head Constraint states that functional heads F-select complement of the same language. This dependency restricts switching between a Functional Head, such as C D NEG and Q and their Complements IP, NP, VP and NP. (2) The Word Language Integrity Constraint states that any lexical item is subject to the principles of the grammar of the language from which it is drawn. We argue that these two principles, which account for both the data collected and the elicitation of judgements of a variety of test sentences from twenty educated Tunisian bilinguals, go further in accounting for the grammar of code switching than the principles given so far in the literature.
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| Subject
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diglossia
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Language, literature and linguistics
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Linguistics
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