Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Transcription conventions
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The rehabilitation of code-switching
- 3 An inductive perspective on bilingualism as interactional practices
- 4 Language choice and speech representation in bilingual interaction
- 5 Language choice and conversational repair in bilingual interaction
- 6 Language choice and appositive structures in written texts in Rwanda
- 7 Summary and conclusion
- References
- Index
3 - An inductive perspective on bilingualism as interactional practices
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Transcription conventions
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The rehabilitation of code-switching
- 3 An inductive perspective on bilingualism as interactional practices
- 4 Language choice and speech representation in bilingual interaction
- 5 Language choice and conversational repair in bilingual interaction
- 6 Language choice and appositive structures in written texts in Rwanda
- 7 Summary and conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to establish a methodology which can be adopted in investigating bilingualism as interactional practices. In Section 1.4, it was indicated that such a methodology should be inductive in nature. This is partly due to the diversity of potential practices and, as a result, to the impossibility of prescribing a relevant theory for each. An inductive attitude allows for data to be explored empirically and for explanations to be developed as the data dictate. Also, for the purpose of mainstreaming the study of bilingual language use, the methodology should be such that it can be applied to bilingual data and to monolingual data as well. Given these requirements, at this point, I can only state in broad lines the general methodological positions which I think can be fruitfully applied, independently of the actual practice under investigation. The chapter starts with these broad lines of methodology before illustrating them with a monolingual example.
From its conception, CA has been understood as the study of interactional practices, of conversational practices, to be sure. Unsurprisingly, therefore, CA provides us with the basics of a methodology we can adopt and adapt in describing interactional practices, conversational or not, monolingual and bilingual alike. The methodology, discussed at length in Pomerantz and Fehr (1997), Ten Have (1999), Sidnell (2014) and others, is known as the study of collections and comprises the following main steps:
1. notice a phenomenon
2. collect a corpus of what seem to be instances of the phenomenon
3. conduct a case-by- case analysis to establish whether each item is indeed an instance of the phenomenon
4. generate hypotheses as to the organisation of the practice as you go
5. identify prototypical instances, variations and deviations
6. propose a structural account for variation and a functional explanation for deviation.
In the following paragraphs, I comment on some of the most salient features of this methodological proposal.
Anybody with any degree of experience in supervising developing researchers will agree with me that identifying researchable topics is one of the most challenging tasks for them. Even when they have access to a corpus of data, let alone when they have to collect that corpus themselves, they are often at a loss as to what to look for.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Bilingualism as Interactional Practices , pp. 42 - 72Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017