Bilingualism and Identity in Deaf Communities

An Analysis of Codeswitching: American Sign Language and Cued English

43 I wish to thank Hilary Franklin, Angela Hauser, Claire Klossner, and Melanie Metzger for their help in various parts of this study. I also thank the participants and their family for permission to videotape their interactions and for sharing information and providing previous video clips and documentation used in this study. 1. Some authors use the term code-mixing when referring to intrasentential codeswitching or borrowing when referring to single morpheme/lexeme switches from one language within an utterance to another language. (Additionally, some authors use code switching as two separate words, whereas others use codeswitching as one word or use code-switching.) In this chapter, I use codeswitching to refer to both intrasentential and intersentential codeswitches as well as borrowing. 2. In this chapter deaf refers to the audiological condition of hearing loss and Deaf to social collectivities; Woodward (1972) first made this distinction. An Analysis of Codeswitching: American Sign Language and Cued English Peter C. Hauser Sociolinguistic studies on the codeswitching that occurs when American Sign Language (ASL) and English come into contact have claimed that the codeswitching is qualitatively different from spoken language codeswitching (e.g., Davis 1989, 1990; Lucas and Valli 1989, 1992). These studies have focused on the contact between users of ASL and users of spoken English. However, the codeswitching between English in a visual modality —cued American English (hereafter cued English) —and ASL has not been studied. This chapter focuses on the codeswitching of a tenyear -old bilingual deaf girl who is fluent in ASL and cued English.1 This chapter provides descriptive examples of ASL–cued English codeswitching as well as a discussion on social motivations for and functions of codeswitching. In the first section of this chapter, studies on spoken language codeswitching are introduced, followed by a second section discussing codeswitching in the Deaf community.2 The third section includes a description of cued English and a review of previous studies on cued languages . Following the review of literature, evidence of ASL–cued English 44 : p e t e r c . h a u s e r codeswitching is demonstrated and compared with examples of codeswitching in spoken languages. The results of this chapter’s study demonstrate that codeswitching between ASL and cued English follows a similar pattern found in spoken language codeswitching. CODESWITCHING Codeswitching occurs when a bilingual or multilingual individual switches from one language to another. The term is used when identifying alternations of linguistic varieties within the same conversation (MyersScotton 1993). Romaine explains that codeswitching occurs when “the items in question form part of the same speech act. They are tied together prosodically as well as by semantic and syntactic relations equivalent to those that join passages in a single speech act” (1995, iii). Codeswitching is commonly found in bilingual communities and has been studied by anthropologists , psychologists, sociologists, and linguists. Codeswitching can be a communicative resource because it reveals the speakers’ sensitivity to both formal and functional aspects of language (Grosjean 1982; Gumperz 1982; Heller 1988; Lanza 1992; Poplack 1981; Romaine 1995). Codeswitching has been found to be used by children (two years old or older) who are from bilingual families (Boeschoten and Verhoeven 1987; Fantini 1985; Lanza 1992; McClure 1981; Zentella 1997). Children in bilingual communities do not only learn two languages but also the social rules regarding when and where the languages may be used and how to codeswitch within a single utterance (Zentella 1997). Numerous studies have demonstrated that there are no qualitative differences between children ’s and older bilinguals’ codeswitching patterns (e.g., Lanza 1992), whereas others have found developmental patterns of codeswitching (e.g., Zentella 1997). Codeswitching can occur at the boundaries of complete sentences (intersentential) or within sentence boundaries (intrasentential). The following are examples of intersentential (example 1) and intrasentential (example 2) Spanish–English codeswitching from Zentella (1997, 80): example 1 Si, pero le hablo en español. When I don’t know something, I’ll talk to her in English. (“Yes, but I talk to her in Spanish.”) ASL and Cued English Codeswitching : 45 example 2 You know they walk que ellas se comen el aisle completo. (“in such a way that they take up the whole”) It is generally held that an individual must know at least two languages in order to be able to codeswitch. Breitborde (1983, 5) stated that “the principal behavior through which bilingualism is expressed is code switching .” Grosjean describes the everyday...