Review: Rena Torres Cacoullos & Catherine E. Travis, Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 372.

Holmes-Elliott, Sophie (2019) Review: Rena Torres Cacoullos & Catherine E. Travis, Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 372. Journal of Linguistics, 1-5. (doi:10.1017/S0022226719000276).

Abstract

Understanding the relationship between language contact and language change continues to be a central concern within a wide range of linguistic disciplines. One route into this problem is to examine the role of intergenerational transmission of linguistic systems. Here the biases in input received by a child acquiring language may induce reanalysis of linguistic forms and rules. The result is a system that is similar, but not identical, to that of their caregivers. In this case, change is the result of contact between speakers, or generations, and manifests, ultimately, in diachronic shift. Another potential perspective is synchronic, and here the route is within the same individual where the use of more than one language brings about convergence between the discrete linguistic systems. It is the latter approach that underpins Rena Torres Cacoullos and Catherine E. Travis’ main thesis. They set out to examine ‘the contact-induced change hypothesis’, where change results not from intergenerational transmission but where ‘bilinguals’ use of two languages spawns similarity between their grammars’ (57). In particular, the authors investigate how the practice of code-switching, which they define as ‘the use of two or more languages in a single discourse event’ (174) is implicated within the process of intraspeaker grammatical convergence.

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