Meeting 27-Feb-2019: Constantina Fotiou (University of Cyprus)

Join us this Wednesday, February 27th, at 6:30pm at the CAT lab (E004) for Constantina’s Fotiou (University of Cyprus) presentation on “An analysis of Cypriot Greek – English codeswitching practices” . If you want to attend remotely via the web conferencing link (here), please let me know by 4:30pm, February 27th. The abstract of Constantina’s talk can be found below.

Abstract

The aim of this talk is to examine Cypriot Greek – English codeswitching practices drawing from a dataset of naturally-occurring conversations among Greek Cypriots. As with all (linguistic) phenomena, codeswitching is better understood if studied from a variety of perspectives and at different levels of analysis. In this talk emphasis will be placed on the linguistic and discourse/conversational levels of analysis. It will be shown that in this context codeswitching mainly takes the form of English insertions in an otherwise Cypriot Greek grammatical structure. Nouns and noun phrases are the most frequently employed insertions followed by bilingual compound verbs (BCVs). The latter consist of a Cypriot Greek light verb bearing all grammatical inflections and, more often than not, an English non-finite verb (e.g., κάμνω analyse). BCVs offer a way to insert English verbs in a Cypriot Greek frame without morphological integration. Regarding the conversational/discourse level of analysis, it will be demonstrated that codeswitching is again of the insertional type in the sense that it does not challenge the predominance of Cypriot Greek in the course of an interaction. It can have a variety of discourse functions especially when it takes the form of constructed dialogue and reiteration. At the same time, it can take the form of participant-related codeswitching which can index specific attributes of the speaker. The talk will end with a short discussion on the broader role that English plays in Cyprus today and highlight the need for future studies examining the wider sociolinguistic functions of codeswitching in this community.


Upcoming CAT meetings- Spring Semester 2019

Mar 6- TBA
Mar 13- Svetlana Karpava, TBA
Mar 20- Elena Theodorou, TBA
Mar 27- TBA
Apr 3- Eleni Papadopoulou, TBA
Apr 10- Demetris Karayiannis, TBA
Apr 17- Kleanthes K. Grohmann, TBA


Written by CAT in News on Wed 27 February 2019. Tags: Meetings


Website theme adapted for the Cyprus Acquisition Team by dkr, based on foundation-default-colours (license) by Kenton Hamaluik.