DISCOURSE MARKERS AS A STRATEGY of CODE-MIXED DISCOURSE in A GALICIAN-Spanish-ENGLISH COMMUNITY

Abstract

The present paper will try to study the point a specific bilingual community (Spanish-Galician-English in London) is at in the bilingual continuum, whether it is in transition to code mixing or rather there is an emergence of a mixed code, which we can infer from the use of functional elements such as discourse markers and interactional signs. The data consists of four conversations among Spanish/Galician/English bilinguals. All participants belong to the bilingual community under study and can be considered complete/full bilinguals (i.e. with fluency in all languages used). One of the key issues in the data is that there are significant patterns of discourse that were separated from markers framing it in language: English markers framing Spanish discourse. This is an indication of code mixing - where a structural pattern that has been grammaticised at the textual level can be perceived.