Code-switching, agency, and the answer possibility space of Spanish-English bilinguals | CU Experts

Abstract; The present study addresses the implicit monolingual bias in our understanding of polar question-answer; sequences by examining them in bilingual conversation. Drawing upon a corpus of naturally-occurring conversational data; amongst native Spanish-English bilinguals in the southwestern United States, I target and explore the ‘fit’ between polar; questions and answers in this community of practice. In this report, I focus specifically on the dimension of language; (non-)concordance between particle answers and the questions they address. Evidence is offered that speakers; produce response particles that are concordant with the language of the question as the pragmatically; unmarked answer format, whereas response particles that are non-concordant with the language of the question; (i.e., ‘code-switched’) are marked, produced agentively and for cause, routinely indexing an emergent stance that is at; variance with the terms established by the question. Some possible avenues for future comparative work on the expression of; agency in question-answer sequences are explored in the Conclusion.

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