Home-comers as a source of language contact: Return Azorean emigrants’ English code-switching practices

• Emily Linares ^[1]
  1. [1] University of California System

     University of California System

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics, ISSN-e 2199-3386, ISSN 1939-0238, Vol. 12, Nº. 1, 2019, págs. 127-154
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, it seeks to highlight the potential of return emigrants — or home-comers — to introduce lexical change in their first language (L1). Second, it represents a contribution to Lusophone linguistics and Romance linguistics more broadly in examining speech performance data from home-comers of an under-researched Portuguese variety, a dialect of Azorean Portuguese. Drawing on Backus’s notion of entrenchment, I first present home-comers as a possible source of language change due to their contact with and potential use of L2 lexical items encountered abroad, and I highlight the Azores as an important yet overlooked site for language contact and change. In analyzing spontaneous oral narratives of emigration collected in the Azores, I demonstrate how home-comers’ ideological attitudes and linguistic resources serve as the ground on which linguistic changes occur. After examining the import of performance data on the individual level, I consider the status of a particular lexical category of code-switches — English discourse markers (i.e. ‘so’ and ‘you know’) — in Romance and their potential to become lexicalized and regarded as Portuguese in this particular contact situation.