Читать книгу Bilingual Couples in Conversation - Silja Ang-Tschachtli - Страница 10

Of course, the communication between any two people is so complex that it would be impossible to give a complete account of it, and it has been necessary to omit certain aspects. For instance, nonverbal communicationnonverbal communication such as facial expressions, eye-contact, and other elements of body languagebody languagenonverbal communication, are not considered in the analysis, as, on the one hand, this would have exceeded the scope of this book, and, on the other hand, I wanted the interviewees to feel comfortable and speak as naturally as possible, and a camera might have made them feel more self-conscious than an audio recordingrecording device. All aspects of conversational analysis are thus based on their verbal expression and prosodic featuressuprasegmental featuresprosodicparalinguistic featuressuprasegmental features featuresprosodic featuressuprasegmental features alone. Moreover, the issue of conversational breakdowns is not considered, and the topic of the construction of couple identity as well as cross-cultural identity in bilingual couples are not explored at length, as this has already been examined elsewhere (see Piller 2002a; Gonçalves 2010a, 2013).

Thus, the main focus of my analysis is on a selection of aspects I believe to be of particular interest about this specific combination of languages and cultures, and about couples with such a high level of proficiency in the relationship language. This narrow focus entails that no universal statements about the communication in bilingual relationships can be made based on this research. In my opinion, however, this does not represent a problem. As Okita puts it, a small-scale study may not aim to make “empirical generalisations”, i.e. generalisations from a sample “to a wider population, based on [the] representativeness of the sample”. Rather, it should aim for “theoretical generalisation, an explanation of how and why things happened in specific settings, and identifying the key explanatory factors in the process, from which questions can be asked about ‘lessons for other settings’, or wider resonance” (2002: 62, emphases in original). Thus, even though the results of this study may not be representative for bilingual, bicultural couples in general, they still give us an understanding of how bilingual couples with these specific parameters communicate. The study reveals that there are countless variables that factor into each couple’s language and into each instance of bilingualism. But precisely because there are myriad forms of bilingualism, it is important to examine individual cases such as these in order to further our understanding of all facets of bilingualism.