Chapter 16. Functional markers in llanito code-switching

Abstract

Several studies have demonstrated that, in situations of language contact, discourse markers, pragmatic markers and modal particles are easily transferable from one language into the other. This contribution tries to examine how does this process take place in bilingual speech, and it discusses data from a corpus of bilingual conversations from Gibraltar. It is argued that switching of discourse and pragmatic markers, as well as modal expressions, is an extremely frequent phenomenon and, more interestingly, that regularities in this process can be found, in the form of regular and recurrent bilingual patterns. These functional elements in fact are shown to behave consistently with each other, allowing to identify class-specific patterns, and with other discourse-relevant entities such as left dislocations and pseudoclefts.