Theoretical and methodological issues in the variable analysis of Spanish-Catalan contact

M. Teresa Turell & Mercè Pujol

Sun. 11-1:05 C

On the basis of a corpus including different language contact variables extracted from two-hour recorded life-stories with thirty-one members of La Canonja (a speech community near Tarragona, Spain), we present substantive findings about code-switching and borrowing in the discourse of autoctonous Catalan speakers and immigrant Spanish speakers, and raise two theoretical and methodological questions about language contact in Catalonia: a) whether the conditions proposed (Sankoff, Poplack and Vanniarajan 1990) to distinguish between single noun code-switches and nonce borrowings are met, and b) whether Spanish borrowings found in the Catalan discourse, that is, both the historically related and the historically non-related to their Catalan counterparts, should be analyzed together.

Using an "index of contact", built upon the basis of information on the degree of contact that the informants had with members of the other community, it was hypothesized that the frequency and the type of contact manifestation would be related not only to linguistic and pragmatic factors, but also to the nature and length of the contact situation. Code-switching and borrowing were analyzed qualitatively in both the Catalan-base-language and the Spanish-base-language discourse. Only the Catalan discourse allowed quantitative analysis of borrowings.

For the quantitative analysis of a corpus of seventeen speakers, borrowings were coded for different linguistic, pragmatic and social constraints: phonological and morphological integration, borrowing type, word class, sociolinguistic style, researcher's status, sex, age, education, origin, vernacular, most usual language, family type (Catalan, immigrant, mixed), and index of contact. The most important finding was that the degree of contact with the Spanish-speaking community was significant as to both borrowing frequency and borrowing type. Through VARBRUL analysis on this data set, this paper will try to show that decisions on the type of theoretical and methodological questions mentioned above have a significant bearing on Spanish-Catalan contact, and in consequence, on the validity of comparisons across different communities and studies.