No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Radical Code-switching in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Abstract
This paper examines the use of Spanish in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz in the context of Torres' (2007) analysis of code-switching strategies by Hispanic authors. First, I consider the nature of the Spanish words that Díaz borrows from Spanish, which are not italicized or translated, and most of which would not be transparent to anglophones. Second, I examine his use of code-switching and point out how Díaz creates powerful bilingual images by flouting well-known constraints on intrasentential code-switching. Finally, using Muysken's (2000) typology of code-switching, I show that in contrast to other texts, which are characterized by sustained alternation, and which Torres (2007) calls 'Radical bilingualism', the main mechanisms used here are insertion and congruent lexicalization, which result in a text where, rather than alternating with English, Spanish becomes part of English. I call this strategy 'radical hybridism'.
Code switching (CS) between Spanish and English is a prevailing and growing phenomenon. There has been a rise over the past two decades in the interest of Spanish-English CS, as it relates to the formation of the Hispanic identity and unity in the U.S. However, there has been little research comparing how CS between bilingual English/Spanish speakers in a natural environment differs or is similar to CS used by Spanish language teachers in the classroom. The researcher for the current study collected speech samples from Spanish teachers’ pedagogical language in lower level courses, which were later analyzed in order to determine if there were similarities in the reasons instructors initiate CS in their pedagogical language and the reasons previous studies have shown speakers to use CS outside the classroom. The data reveals that while the speech environment and dynamics between listener and speaker are different, Spanish language teachers and speakers outside the language classroom implement CS for similar reasons. La alternancia de códigos (AI) entre el español y el inglés es un fenómeno prevaleciente que está creciendo en los ambientes de contacto entre las dos lenguas. En las últimas dos décadas, ha habido un aumento en el interés en la AI entre el español y el inglés, al igual que en esta relación con una identidad hispana en los EEUU. Poca investigación se ha hecho, sin embargo, que compara cómo difiere o se asemeja la AI entre hablantes bilingües del español e inglés a la AI que implementan los instructores de español en sus aulas. La autora de este estudio recopiló muestras de habla del lenguaje pedagógico de clases de niveles bajos y las analiza para determinar si las razones por las que los instructores inician la AI en su lenguaje pedagógico son similares al uso de la AI fuera del aula. Los datos muestran que mientras los ambientes de habla y la dinámica entre oyente y hablante son diferentes, los instructores de español y los hablantes fuera del aula utilizan AI por razones similares.
Article visualizations:
</p
Resumen
En este trabajo analizo una actividad de imagen que participa directamente en la construcción de la identidad de individuos y grupos bilingües, pero que no ha sido identificada como tal hasta ahora, aunque el fenómeno a través del cual se realiza - la alternancia de lenguas en la interacción comunicativa entre dichos miembros de la comunidad bilingüe - cuenta ya con numerosos estudios. La comunidad bilingüe en que me enfoco es la de los hispanounidenses: los hispanos que residen en los Estados Unidos y usan en su comunicación diaria tanto el español como el inglés. Después de presentar unos datos acerca de la demografía hispanounidense y sobre el uso de los dos idiomas entre los miembros de dicha comunidad, reinterpreto testimonios de los usuarios y ejemplos de alternancia de lenguas recogidos en trabajos sociolingüísticos previos como actividades de imagen social en dos niveles diferentes: el macronivel de la interacción comunicativa global y el micronivel de ciertos actos de habla concretos dentro de dicha interacción. En el macronivel, se trata de una actividad de imagen de afiliación intragrupal y, simultáneamente, de autonomía extragrupal; mientras que en el micronivel se trata de efectos de cortesía atenuadora o intensificadora dirigidos a la imagen del interlocutor, o de ataques a la imagen del mismo, cuando no forma parte de la comunidad.
Confession plays a crucial yet ambivalent role in Junot Díaz’s fiction and paratexts. While scholarship has emphasized confession as a powerful means of witnessing male misbehavior, the #MeToo era urges readers to question who or what, beyond mere representation, confession serves. I suggest that protagonist Yunior’s compulsive confessions of lying, cheating and womanizing in This is How You Lose Her (2012) expose how his sense of self is split between an authoritarian Dominican past and an oppressive US present. Yunior’s macho behavior conjures the historical specter of Dominican strongman dictator, Trujillo, while his confessions make readers complicit in his immorality, echoing Trujillo’s manipulation of information for control. Forging this uneasy textual intimacy between reader and narrator further underscores mainstream expectations, in the US present, that minority writers “confess” their intimate lives for entertainment, conscribing how and what they express. Yet Yunior’s narrative also conscribes female representation by centering—and then absolving—male misbehavior through a confession that looks like a dialogue (addressing “you”) but in fact functions as a monologue. I also interrogate Díaz’s authorial interviews and apply Lili Loofbourow’s idea of the “male self-pardon” to Díaz’s autobiographical essay “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma” (2018), in which he reveals surviving childhood sexual assault and confesses that he subsequently “hurt” intimate female partners. I argue that confession—whether Yunior’s or Díaz’s—perpetuates a masculine monologue that marginalizes women’s voices. Masculine confessions reach for intimacy but fail when they cannot imagine women as fully as men.
Transculturation, Translanguaging and Junot Díaz’s Novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life" of Oscar Wao
The aim of this article is to talk about two concepts: transculturation and translanguaging and how these theories are expressed in Junot Díaz’s novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”. The first term was coined by the Cuban anthropologist, Fernando Ortiz, and it refers to the encounter between cultures in which they are changed by adapting elements from the each other. Translanguaging is a process in which bilingual speakers use their languages as an integrated communication system. This term was described in detail by, among others, Ofelia García and Li Wei. After introducing these concepts, the article will focus on how these theories contribute to the creation of a text, in this case the novel by Díaz, that crosses linguistic and cultural barriers.
This paper analyzes Junot Díaz’s most recent works The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007. The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao . New York: Riverhead) and This is How You Lose Her (2012. This is how you lose her . New York: Riverhead) by using Muysken’s (2000. Bilingual speech. A typology of code-mixing . Cambridge: CUP) typology of code-switching to illustrate the types of language mixing devices present in these two texts. I point out that Díaz’s innovative use of radical bilingualism is not due to the quantity of sentences including Spanish, rather to the quality of mixing and switching in his works. Further, I elaborate on Casielles-Suárez, Eugenia. (2013. Radical code-switching in the Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90. 475–487) study using Torres’ (2007. In the contact zone: Code-switching strategies by Latino/a writers. MELUS 32(1). 75–96) categorization of code-switching strategies utilized by U.S. Hispanic authors. I find that instead of Díaz’s texts gratifying the bilingual reader (Torres. 2007. In the contact zone: Code-switching strategies by Latino/a writers. MELUS 32(1). 75–96) or creating radical hybridism (Casielles-Suárez. 2013. Radical code-switching in the Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90. 475–487), that these two works illustrate radical bilingualism. In contrast to the majority of U.S. Spanish-English bilingual texts, which incorporate Spanish by using simple insertions, translations, bold font and italics, Díaz creates radically bilingual works by using a variety of Spanish and English varieties, the indirect influence of Spanish in monolingual English sentences, intra-word insertions, a diversity of insertion types and hybrid noun-phrases.
Williams offers a reading of the bestselling but controversial Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz, which identifies in his work some of the unresolved language politics of empire, decolonisation, totalitarianism and migration. The chapter questions perspectives on Díaz which identify in his multilingualism a democratic, universalist impulse, by instead asserting that Díaz’s writing strategies must be read both as a part of his extensive authorly self-fashioning and the antagonistic relationship he cultivates with both readers and institutions. Williams also argues for a closer consideration of Díaz’s relationship with Caribbean history and philosophy. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that Díaz’s foregrounding of risk, antagonism and violence makes for an aesthetic of ‘dangerous multilingualism’.
This article reads Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao via its trope of ‘páginas en blanco’, in order to argue that its creolised language, stylistic devices, and structural organisation mimic the experience of reading narratives about or produced under conditions of censorship and repression. Positioning Oscar Wao as what Roland Barthes calls a ‘writerly’ text, it argues that the novel’s linguistic, typographic, and structural blanks demand an engaged, active readership that must translate, explain, and uncensor parts of the novel for themselves. The latter part of the article focuses on authorial paratexts in which Díaz responds parodically to readers’ desire for clarity and certainty. It demonstrates how Díaz appears to ‘fill in’ his novel’s textual blanks while also drawing attention to readers’ necessary participation in the ongoing construction of textual meaning. The partial erasures and rewritings that occur at different stages of this novel’s production and reception convey the way narratives, especially those produced about or under conditions of domination, will always contain certain unreadable blanks.
The language practices of Latinos in the US continue to attract attention from politicians, educators, journalists, linguists and the general Hispanic and non-Hispanic public. While monolingual speakers of English in the US expect Hispanics to shift to English like other minority language speakers have done in the past, monolingual speakers of Spanish expect them to speak "pure" Spanish. Even Spanish-English bilingual speakers criticize Latinos for mixing Spanish and English or speaking Spanglish. This term has been rejected by some linguists who claim that it is technically flawed and only applies to casual oral registers. In this paper I consider the linguistic nature, sociolinguistic functions and attitudes towards Spanglish, I show that Latinos are using this hybrid, heteroglossic variety beyond casual oral registers, and I suggest a broader perspective which not only considers the linguistic features of Spanglish but also the political, social and cultural issues involved.
Bueno offers a discussion of how geek culture is found in literature, in an effort to expand the critical analysis of this topic beyond its presence in television and movies. Using examples from various literary works and drawing from concepts such as intertextuality, paratextuality, and hypertextuality, Bueno explores the nature of geeks and nerds and how they are found in novels such as Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The term geek metafiction, therefore, applies to the kind of literature where geek culture plays a central role.
While mixing languages in natural speech production has often been inaccurately ascribed to illiteracy or lack of linguistic competence, doing so in writing is a long-standing practice in bilingual literature. This practice may fulfill stylistic or aesthetic purposes, be a source of credibility and/or communicate biculturalism, humor, criticism, and ethnicity, among other functions. Here, I analyze a selection of contemporary Spanish–English bilingual literature (poetry, drama, and fiction) written by Mexican American, Nuyorican, and Cuban American authors focusing on the types, and significance, of code-switching (CS) in their works. The aim of the study is to determine to what extent the socio-pragmatic functions that have been attested in natural bilingual discourse are present in literary CS, whether it is mimetic rather than rhetorical, and what differences exist both across literary genres and among the three US Latino groups. I also emphasize the cultural aspect of CS, a crucial element that has often been overlooked in the search for grammatical constraints.
This study considers the English-Spanish code-switching employed by Susana Chávez-Silverman in her text Killer Crónicas (2004) in comparison to other bilingual texts like Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo (2002) and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). I view them in the context of Torres’s (2007) code-switching strategies utilized by US Hispanic authors. Then, I analyze two chapters of Killer Crónicas sentence-by-sentence using Muysken’s (2000) typology of code-switching to illustrate that congruent lexicalization is the category that the language mixing in this text most resembles. I show that, unlike Caramelo and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Killer Crónicas does not have a base language. Finally, I consider Casielles-Suarez’s (2013) concept of radical hybridism and whether Killer Crónicas exemplifies the same kind of radical language mixing.
Torres (2007) notes that “[m]uch of the Latino/a literature written in English in the US incorporates Spanish at some level” (76). She categorizes three strategies that authors utilize for the inclusion of Spanish into their texts: transparent Spanish, gratifying the bilingual reader, and radical bilingualism. Transparent Spanish includes monolingual English readers by incorporating Spanish vocabulary, which is understood through the context. Gratifying the bilingual reader uses Spanish in a way that provides special pleasure to the bilingual reader. Monolingual readers can often decipher the meaning from the context, but sometimes must resort to a dictionary. The last category, radical bilingualism, contains sustained sections of code-switching and can only be read by a bilingual audience. Torres comments that Killer Crónicas is different from many other texts authored by Hispanic authors such as Sandra Cisneros and Junot Díaz, who both prefer English as the base language of their novels. For example, in Caramelo, the occurrences of Spanish come in the form of simple nouns and are usually italicized, most resembling transparent Spanish. Díaz’s bilingual text also uses English as the base language; however, the single nouns that he inserts are many times culturally charged words that gratify bilingual readers. As a result, they are not very transparent to monolingual readers. Chávez-Silverman, on the other hand, includes Spanish in her texts in a distinct way that exemplifies radical bilingualism. Torres (2007) comments about Killer Crónicas that “[t]he language of the text captures the author’s bicultural reality and her transnational experiences living in an ‘in between’ place” (89).
My analysis of two chapters of Killer Crónicas found that more than 50% of the utterances contain sustained congruent lexicalization, which occurs when two languages share a similar language structure. These hybrid sentences would be unintelligible to monolingual English or Spanish readers. In comparing Killer Crónicas to other texts that include radical bilingualism, it seems that they employ radical language mixing in different ways. For example, Díaz’s novel uses English as the base language to include utterances which may not be understood by monolingual English readers, as in (1), taken from Díaz (2007).
(1). In her twenties, sunny and amiable, whose cuerpo was all pipa and no culo, a “mujer alegre” (in the parlance of the period).
Casielles-Suárez (2013) comments about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao that “the quantity and quality of the Spanish words and phrases which are constantly inserted in English creates hybrid phrases with the result that, rather than alternating with English, Spanish becomes part of English” (447), thus resulting in radical hybridism.
Killer Crónicas, on the other hand, does not have a base language and can only be read by a bilingual audience, as in (2).
(2). Oh, esos delicate, innocuous pale-pink blooms que de día no huelen a nada ahora overpower me, casi jaqueca-strong
Díaz’s and Chávez-Silverman’s texts employ radical code-switching in distinct ways that the term radical bilingualism does not account for. I propose that Killer Crónicas exemplifies language fusion, which occurs as Spanish and English fuse together through the use of sustained code-switching and intra-word switches, to create a completely hybrid text...
Mixture of Spanish and English, whether in isolated loan words or in code-switching of clauses and sentences, while socially motivated, is subject to clear linguistic constraints. Quantitative analysis of mixing in conversations of Mexican-Americans suggests specific functional constraints to express tense/aspect/mood and subject/object relationships, as well as structural constraints which permit only surface structures which are grammatical in both languages. Resolution of structural conflict plays a key role, so that lexical cores trigger longer phrasal switches if they govern rules which create non-shared surface structures. The relative frequency of mixes without structural conflict is constrained by discourse function.
The occurrence of codeswitching, or the seemingly random alternation of two languages both between and within sentences, has been shown (Gumperz, 1976; Pfaff, 1975; Wentz, 1977) to be governed not only by extralinguistic but also linguistic factors. For the balanced bilingual, codeswitching appears to be subject to an ‘equivalence constraint’ (Poplack, 1978): i.e. it tends to occur at points in discourse where juxtaposition of L1 and L2 elements does not violate a surface syntactic rule of either language. If correct, the equivalence constraint on codeswitching may be used to measure degree of bilingual ability. It was hypothesized that equivalence would either be violated by non-fluent bilinguals, or that switch points which are ‘risky’ in terms of syntactic well-formedness (i.e. those which occur within a sentence) would tend to be avoided altogether. To test this hypothesis, I analysed the speech of 20 Puerto Rican residents of a stable bilingual community, exhibiting varying degrees of bilingual ability. Quantitative analysis of their switches revealed that both fluent and non-fluent bilinguals were able to code-switch frequently and still maintain grammaticality in both Lx and L2. While fluent bilinguals tended to switch at various syntactic boundaries within the sentence, non-fluent bilinguals favoured switching between sentences, allowing them to participate in the codeswitching mode, without fear of violating a grammatical rule of either of the languages involved. These results suggest that the codeswitching mode proceeds from that area of the bilingual's grammar where the surface structures of Lx and L2 overlap, and that codeswitching, rather than representing debasement of linguistic skill, is actually a sensitive indicator of bilingual ability.
This study examines the use of Spanish and English discourse markers among first, second, and third generation Spanish-speakers in Chicago, Illinois, comparing Mexican, Puerto Rican, and MexiRican speakers. We find that so is a core borrowing for all groups, although there were some differences in the frequency of usage of the discourse markers across the different Spanish dialect varieties. We also find that of all the variables analyzed, weaker Spanish proficiency is most strongly correlated with more frequent usage of so at the expense of entonces. We predict that these two discourse markers will coexist for some time, but that the frequency of so may increase and the frequency of entonces may decrease for all functions with subsequent generations.
A continuum of language alternation phenomena is discussed which spans out between the prototypes labelled codeswitching (CS),language mixing(LM),and fused lects (FLs), with CS and FLs representing the polar extremes of the continuum and LM a point in between. In addition, an interpretation of this continuum is suggested according to which the transition CS-LM-FL can be understood as a case of structural sedimentation.
This article presents an empirical and theoretical critique of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model (Myers-Scotton, 1993; Myers-Scotton and Jake, 2001), and includes a response to Jake, Myers-Scotton and Gross's (2002) (JMSG) critique of MacSwan (1999, 2000) and reactions to their revision of the MLF model as a . The author argues that although a new structural definition of the Matrix Language (ML) makes the MLF model falsifiable, its empirical predictions are inconsistent with the facts of codeswitching (CS). The author also identifies significant theoretical problems associated with the MLF model, and suggests that it be rejected on empirical and theoretical grounds, and on grounds of scientific parsimony. In addition, the author contends that JMSG's critique of the Minimalist approach to CS rests on conceptually significant misreadings of published research in CS and in the theory of syntax, and that JMSG fail to motivate their central claim, namely, that a Minimalist approach to CS cannot succeed without incorporating the ML construct. It is further shown that an analysis of the CS facts which JMSG consider as their test case may be straightforwardly pursued within the Minimalist Program without appealing to the ML construct or any other aspect of the MLF model. The author concludes with the recommendation that research on CS depart from the formulation of general CS-specific constraints like the MLF model and engage in the task of analyzing language contact phenomena in terms of independently motivated constructs of linguistic theory.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
In the study of bilingual code-switching, identifying the typology and language of individual switched elements has generally proceeded from theoretical models involving the identification of a base language and the phrase structure of both languages. Such fundamental notions as word order, the language of functional heads, relations of syntactic government, and purely quantitative measures of the amount of material in each language have variously been used to classify language switching within a single clause. The formal study of bilingual code-switching—with Spanish-English bilingualism receiving high prominence—has enjoyed more than three decades of serious activity, incorporating the intersection of sociolinguistics and variationist models, syntactic theory, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and literary and cultural studies. After more than three decades of research on Spanish-English code-switching it might seem that there is little left to explore; there are, however, some phenomena that do not fit easily into current typologies, and one such manifestation will be explored in the present study. An accepted axiom of Spanish-English code-switching is that there are clear quantitative and qualitative differences among the language switches of fluent bilinguals, Spanish-speaking immigrants who learned English in adolescence or adulthood, and native speakers of English who have acquired Spanish as a L2. The first group is most noted for intrasentential code-switching and for the use of language switches to achieve pragmatic ends such as foregrounding, ethnic solidarity, persuasion, and the like. Calques of idiomatic expressions in English are frequent when speaking Spanish, with fewer cases of Spanish calques in English discourse, and numerous loans from English are present. Spanish- speaking immigrants typically switch only at major discourse boundaries such as sentences and paragraphs, usually in response to shifting domains of discourse. Calques from English are rare and English lexical items are usually inserted in non-assimilated fashion. English-speaking students of Spanish switch to English primarily when their abilities in Spanish are exceeded by the demands of a particular communicative task, and often show less sensitivity to the linguistic abilities and preferences of their interlocutors. Calques from English are common, including combinations that violate Spanish syntactic rules, and unassimilated English words may be freely inserted whenever the Spanish word is unknown. Seldom does a single type of language shifting span all three groups of nominally bilingual speakers. The reasons for these qualitative differences constitute a major research question, as does the related issue of what the bilingual grammars of all three groups of speakers have in common. 2. The study of Spanish-English code-switching in the United States Grammatical constraints on Spanish-English language switching formed the basis for some of the earliest and most influential studies of bilingual code mixing, and form part of the core bibliography to this day. A number of specific claims about the grammatical structures of allowable code-switches emerged from these early studies, and were frequently extrapolated to include other instances of bilingual usage. As the number of individual case studies grew—including languages from widely differing families such as Korean, Japanese, Tagalog, Arabic, Hebrew, Cantonese, Berber, Nahuatl, and Polish, among many others—it became apparent that the close typological similarity between Spanish and English facilitated fluent intrasentential code-switching of a sort not as often found when typologically very different languages are switched. While none of the syntactic claims made for
In this article, the author addresses the question of how the mind represents two languages in simultaneous bilingualism. Some linguistic theories of intrasentential code switching are reviewed, with a focus on the Minimalist approach of MacSwan (1999b); the author concludes that evidence from code switching suggests that bilinguals have discrete and separate Lexicons for the languages they speak, each with its own internal principles of word formation, as well as separate phonological systems. However, the author argues that computational resources common to the two languages generate monolingual and bilingual syntactic derivations alike. Advantages of the Minimalist Program for the analysis of code switching data are discussed at some length.
The aim of this paper is to argue that the process of code-mixing is constrained by the government relation that holds between the constituents of a sentence. The government constraint replaces a number of specific constraints that have been proposed in the literature to account for apparently ‘impossible’, ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘non-occurring’ types of intra-sentential switches. Code-mixing is a form of linguistic behaviour which produces utterances consisting of elements taken from the lexicons of different languages. Some examples are given in (1).(Received January 26 1985)