The Role of Codeswitching, Loan Translation and Interference review
Ad Backus, an Associate
Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at Tilburg University has
written an interesting article, entitled: The Role of Codeswitching, Loan
Translation and Interference in the Emergence of an Immigrant Variety of
Turkish. He discusses the ‘big
question’: How to distinguish code-switching from borrowings? As one can assume
from the title, the author focuses on the Turkish immigrant community in
Netherlands, but he provides a wider insight into the topic in general too.
The author has
interesting approaches to the field of contact linguistics. In the literature,
diachronic (issues of historical linguistics) and synchronic dimensions (theoretical
linguistics) are separated, however, Backus proposes to handle them together
because to understand certain linguistic phenomenon, it is inevitable to
understand the close relationship between these two dimensions. Because ‘Synchronic
behavior determines diachronic development’, he deals with the distinction of
lexicon and syntax. Of course, this distinction already exists, but they ‘miss
some important generalization’. Due to the wrong approach to the distinction,
linguists fail to theorize what codeswitching and contact-induced structural
change have in common. He argues that code-switching studies are not able to
study language change issues which problem causes the failure of distinguishing
between code-switching and borrowings. The main problem with the division is
that how we can decide if a certain element is only a code-switching or a
borrowing, so in this way embedded this element into the language of the
immigrants. In order to make this distinction, he describes what exactly
code-switching is. He distinguishes insertion and alternation which is very
similar to the intrasentential and intersentential division. Lexical borrowing
is considered the diachronic counterpart of synchronic codeswitching. Words can
appear as codeswitches, but most likely they are loanwords, although often it’s
very hard to decide which. The frequency of use could provide some clue to
solving the codeswitching –borrowing difficulty. After this discussion, he deals
with loan translations, also known as ‘calques’, which also have this
synchronic diachronic duality. These are words or phrases which are more or
less literally translated from a language into another one. He discusses the
third type of contact phenomenon which is structural interference. ‘While
lexical phenomena tend to be interpreted with a synchronic bias, structural
phenomena are more often seen in a diachronic light.’ That’s why the focus is
on the change of the two grammatical systems and their synchronic interference.
The author
illustrates these difficult issues with a lot of examples, so he makes the
article very comprehensable.
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