COMMUNICATIVE CODES AND SPEECH VARIETIES IN GALIZAN-PORTUGUESE / SPANISH CONVERSATION

CELSO ÁLVAREZ-CÁCCAMO
Universidade da Coruña (Galicia, Spain)

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the interplay of communicative codes and the layering of speech varieties in supposedly 'bilingual' or 'monolingual' talk in Galiza. The starting point is that, in order to give account of the subtleties of indexicality in interaction, a clear distinction must be drawn between speech varieties as identifiable grammatical objects, and codes as systems of signification, that is, of indexical transduction between communicative intentions and utterances, and then between utterances and interpretations. In essence, what is proposed here is both a new understanding of the scope of the notions 'code' and 'variety', and of the relations between the two. Contrary to most current research that identifies 'codes' with 'linguistic varieties', codes are regarded here not as linguistic systems but as general semiotic mechanisms which underlie the mobilization of spoken material. It is hypothesized that, particularly in sociolinguistic situations of fluid speech layering (commonly called 'conversational code-switching'), such as the Galizan case, the Urban Wolof continuum (Swigart), or the Italian/dialect contact (Sobrero), participants may accountably orient themselves toward linguistic systems and communicative codes other than those blurred under the linguist's constructs of languages ('Galizan-Portuguese' or 'Spanish') and the subsequent 'code-switches' between them.

It is proposed that various communicative codes work jointly and simultaneously at several levels of conversational organization for the production of utterances. Discursive interaction is viewed as resulting from a number of codes governing the itineraries between intentions and interpretations: situational codes, activity or episode codes, and speech act codes. The interplay between these codes manifests itself in the local production of 'monolingual' or 'mixed' speech and prosodic styles in variable proportions. The material deployed as the manifestation of codes includes specific grammar(s), lexicons, and prosodies. These linguistic systems are internally held together by structural constraints, whereas codes are tied by situational and communicative constraints. Specifically, while mixed speech ('conversational code-switching') may be grammatically described as the rapid alternation between varieties, its overall effect may be that of a 'recurrent contextualization cue' (Auer), and, thus, mixed speech may be viewed as a relatively autonomous system directly generated by a single code. Conversely, a pattern of consistent, 'non-reciprocal' language choices (for instance, monitored Galizan and monitored Spanish) between two participants may be the manifestation of a shared situational code connected, for instance, to face-keeping and negative politeness; in these cases, switching the code toward positive politeness may entail producing mixed speech. Thus, it follows that there is not necessarily a correspondence between specific points of language alternation and switching of underlying codes by which speakers transduce local intentions into talk and by which listeners extract interpretations of intentions from speakers' utterances. In this regard, seeming 'code-switching' events may be only an analyst's untestable construct, while meaningful switchings in codes, when manifested by means other than language alternation, may, in turn, go unnoticed by standard grammatical description. Therefore, for the notion of conversational code-switching to be operational, it is here proposed that it be reserved only for those cases where it can be demonstrably shown through interactional analysis that participants orient themselves toward changes in codes, regardless of whether speech-variety alternations occur or not.

It is proposed, then, that four possible communicative patterns result from the manifestation of communicative codes through the mobilization of speech varieties: (1) communicative code-switching with alternation of speech varieties; (2) code-switching without alternation of speech varieties; (3) speech-variety alternation without code-switching; and (4) neither speech-variety alternation nor code-switching. This entails that the current notion of code-switching be narrowed so that it excludes non-meaningful speech-variety alternations, as well as broadened in order to include certain, non-grammatical or non-prosodic contextualizing phenomena, including paralinguistic or gestural cues.

The main sources of data for this work are audio- and video-recorded naturalistic conversations in Galiza, and samples of formal discourse in public domains (mostly from radio or television broadcasts) collected for the ADPA Project (The Analysis of Current Public Discourse) by members of the Department of General Linguistics and Literary Theory of the University of A Corunha. Supporting data from the literature will be discussed.