8 Code-Switching in Historical Materials: Research at the Limits of Contact Linguistics

Abstract

Code-switching is widely studied within contact linguistics, as one of the "symptoms of contact" (Gardner-Chloros, 2010: 194) or "mechanisms of contactinduced change" (Thomason, 2001: 60). Ongoing since the 1970s, the research has mainly focused on interactional code-switching characteristic of spoken language, and the materials explored have typically been contemporary or at least relatively recent (see e.g. Poplack, 1980; Auer, 1998; Muysken, 2000). In the last twenty years, however, there has also been increasing interest in individual and societal bi-and multilingualism and 'multilingual practices' , such as codeswitching, in historical linguistics. This particularly applies to English historical linguistics (e.g. Trotter, 2000; Davidson, 2003; Schendl and Wright, 2011).2 Despite the growing number of publications in this field, historical codeswitching research does not easily fall into one specific discipline within linguistics. For example, many historical linguists working on multilingual features recorded in older texts and genres may not think of themselves as contact linguists, regardless of the presence of two or more languages in their research materials. And while code-switching (henceforth CS) has moved into-or at least closer to-the mainstream of historical linguistics, little or no reference seems to be made to CS in the written communication of the past in many of the recent key works written by and for contact linguists. What, then, is historical CS research a sub-discipline of? This chapter addresses the above question by discussing historically oriented contact linguistics (is there such a sub-discipline?) and reviewing the

Mittelalterliches Code-Switching? Zu den Sprachwechselstrategien Notkers III. von St. Gallen

“…6 Vgl. dazu den Überblick über bisherige Untersuchungen beiKämmerer (2006: 37-45) und Schendl (2012) sowie die generellen Betrachtungen vonSkaffari & Mäkilähde (2014). Als ein Beispiel für eine umfassende Analyse eines frühmittelalterlichen, lateinisch-volkssprachlichen…”