Читать книгу Bilingual Couples in Conversation - Silja Ang-Tschachtli - Страница 25

While there is an abundance of research in the field of bilingualism, bilingual couples received little attention until the 1990s. As with research on cross-cultural couples, research on bilingual couples was conducted mostly from the perspective that they pose a problem (Piller 2002a: 19), and only in recent years have researchers begun to move away from the assumption that bilingual relationships are inherently problematic. In addition, most studies do not examine the manner in which bilingual couples talk to each other, but rather concentrate on one of the partners, most commonly the female one (see also section 3.2.2, “Bicultural couples”). An example of this is Heller and Lévy’s study of 28 Francophone women married to Anglophone men in Ontario, Canada. The authors examined the women’s language practices and their attitudes towards them, as well as their feelings about their own identities (1992: 20). Heller and Lévy found that the women reconstructed the French-English language border linguistically in their conversations, and that they did not necessarily assimilate to their partner’s culture (1992: 39). Some of them had a strong focus on their Francophone identity, while others attempted to construct and combine two linguistic identities.

Probably the most extensive study on bilingual, bicultural couples was conducted by Piller (2002a). She examined 57 German and English-speaking couples living in a number of countries, based on self-recorded conversations or monologues, questionnaires, letters and/or focus group interviews. In her analysis, she considered a number of aspects, including the couples’ reported language choice and mixing behaviour. Piller was concerned with the ideologies and other factors underlying these language choices (see section 5.2, “Factors influencing the language choice of bilingual couples”, for a more in-depth overview), and studied the participants’ reported language skills, processes of L2 acquisition and language ideologies, as well as their perceptions of their mother tongues. She discovered that many of the participants had a strong emotional attachment to their partner’s language, a feeling that she calls “language desirelanguage desire” (2002a: 100; see also section 7.2.1, “Attraction in bilingual, bicultural couples”).

Another focus of Piller’s research is the construction of bilingual, cross-cultural couplehood and identity. She posits that, because bilingual individuals often feel or think differently depending on the language they speak, bilingual couples may also view, experience, or performperformingcouplehood their couplehood differently. Like other identities, Piller argues, couple identityidentitycouple is not something fixed, but a hybrid construct that may be performed differently depending on the environment the couple is in (2002a: 11). Hence, “[c]ross-cultural couplehood is not a state of being, but an act of doing” (2002a: 2). Through detailed analyses of their speech, she demonstrated how the couples jointly constructed and performed their identity linguistically (2002a: ch 7). The couples did this on a conversational level, for instance by using their own private words, as well as on a discourse level, by reiterating “‘founding myths’ and stories they tell about themselves to account for their being together” (2002: 225).

Such linguistic strategies serve the partners to highlight similarities between each other and enable them to construct their couple identity, but they also discredit the prevailing idea of intermarriage as a problem (Piller 2002a: 189). The couples’ reports showed that they had all come across negative opinions of intermarriage, and that “they [were] aware of a widespread framing of cross-cultural marriage as problematic” (2002a: 186). In analysing the couples’ discursive strategies, Piller found that they used three major strategies to frame their relationships as unproblematic. Firstly, they contrasted themselves with other cross-cultural couples by highlighting the cultural proximity between English and German-speaking countries. They thus created a discourse that presented “European or Western culture as a homogenous cultural sphere”, and, in doing so, depicted their relationship as less problematic than other bilingual relationships (2002a: 194). Secondly, the couples sometimes “downplay[ed] national identityidentitynational and focus[ed] on other aspects of their identity”, appealing to non-national identities instead (2002a: 189). They referred to common historical roots of their cultures, to shared values or interests, to similarities between their personalities, or to their “shared linguistic identity as bilinguals” (2002a: 199). This discourse of collective identities allowed them “to construct themselves as conventionally and appropriately similar” (2002a: 197). Thirdly, some of them used a discourse of post-national identities, for instance by presenting themselves as cosmopolitans, world citizens or fellow Europeans (2002a: 202).

The couples in Piller’s study produced not only a discourse of constructing similarities, but also one of deconstructing differences or framing them positively. Hence, many described their cultural differences as attractive, exciting or exotic, or framed their being together as their destiny. Others portrayed themselves as atypical of their cultural background or as exceptions from their national stereotypical norm (2002a: 205). Moreover, the couples emphasized that they could overcome cross-cultural difference through compromise and change. In fact, Piller states that the “discourse of change and compromise is unique in [her] corpus in its frequency, as it appears in every single conversation, without exception” (2002a: 213). Thus, the couples seem to feel that “love should and must transcend [their] differences” (2002a: 2). In addition to the couples’ positive framing of their relationship, Piller claims that there is “no indication whatsoever in [her] data that the participants’ relationships are in any way more or less problematic for them than they are for any monolingual and mono-cultural couple” (2002a: 186).

A particularly interesting characteristic of the couples’ conversational style is their use of other-repetitionother-repetition and other-completionother-completion. According to Piller, “[t]he most salient feature of the transcripts […] is the enormous amount of repetition between speakers. All the conversations […] are characterized by high levels of repetition” (2002a: 228). Such other-repetition is generally seen as indicative of a collaborative floor, and is typical among people in a close relationship (2002a: 228). Piller examined the different functions of repetition and the situations in which repetition tended to occur, for instance as meta-linguistic comments, corrections, or as a consequence of word searches, word offers or mishearing. Bilingual conversations potentially provide more contexts for other-completion to occur, as there may, for instance, be more word searches (2002a: 235). Piller found that cases in which the partners finished each other’s sentences were also frequent in her data. The couples appeared to value other-completion, as instances thereof were “almost always endorsed by the recipient” (2002a: 237). Both other-repetition and other-completion, Piller believes, facilitate the discursive performance of a joint couple identity (2002a: 242).

Like Piller, Gonçalves (2010a, 2010b, 2013) concentrated on the topic of identity in her work on bilingual couples. She examined conversations with seven couples consisting of a native speaker of English and Swiss German, as well as two conversations with English speakers, each of whom was in a relationship with a Swiss partner, but who participated without their spouse. All of the couples resided in central Switzerland. Gonçalves analysed their speech with regard to their language ideologieslanguage ideologies and identity performancesidentityperformance ofperformingself. Her main focus was not on the communication between the partners, or “couple talk”, but rather on the female Anglophone partners’ personal experiences in their partnership and their host country. In particular, she focused on the discursive construction of identitiesidentitydiscursive construction of and on doing Swissperformingculture, by looking at the linguistic and socio-cultural practices that the participants had adopted or rejected (2013: ch 7). According to Gonçalves, people in such an expatriate situation “are constantly positioning and re-positioning themselves as certain types of individuals who perform or carry out particular local and socio-cultural practices within specific contexts” (Gonçalves 2010b: 76). To demonstrate this, she analysed a variety of linguistic resources used by the participants, “such as direct reported speech, prosodically marked utterances, pronominal use, code-mixing, and overt mentions of identity labels to position themselves and each other while simultaneously indexing various types of identitiesidentitymultiple” (Gonçalves 2013: 192–193). Based on these features, she explored to what extent the identities of the English-speaking partners have shifted, and showed that some of them completely reject having an identity made up of both cultures, whereas others accept or even embrace a multiple or culturally hybrid identity (2013: 203).

In addition, Gonçalves investigated her participants’ language ideologies with regard to Standard German and the local dialect, as well as their perceptions about their language learning process. She perceived a correlation between the non-native speakers’ perception of their own skills in the local Bernese dialect and their notion of having a Swiss identityidentitynational (2010b: 82). Moreover, Gonçalves found that the Anglophone partners in her study “position[ed] and align[ed] themselves with Swiss German native speakers and their respective language ideologies” (2013: 151). The participants’ reports indicated that their process of language learning “was always inevitably connected to their own language ideologies and the continuous re-production of the ‘ideology of the dialect’ within their constructed social relations” (2013: 163). Based on her interviews, Gonçalves concludes that doing Swiss is “an intersubjective collaboration of social, cultural, gendered and linguistic practices and performances that emerge in social interaction” (2013: 165). Thus, language practices and ideologies may serve as a window onto the complex process of intercultural identity formation.