The paper presents problems related to texts that record the bilingual speech of their authors, carriers of two languages, L1 and L2. The bilingual author, while creating his or her text, drew from the verbal resources of both of his or her languages. The verbalized encounters of two codes in the text (code switching, code mixing and interference) constitute manifestations of bilingual speech. The paper is composed of two parts. The first part defines the linguistic status of texts in bilingual speech as a separate object of linguistic research. This status is determined by the presence of transcodic markers on the surface of the texts as traces of active bilingualism of their authors, and the awareness that the authors have of transgressing the standards caused by a change of language within a single text. As an object of linguistic research, texts in bilingual speech pose the question, on the one hand, of how the bilingualism of the author influences the linguistic shape of the text itself, and on the other hand, of how heterogenous elements, incompatible by nature, create a definite semantic whole, a supersign that the receiver interprets as a textual semantic unit. Study of texts in bilingual speech falls into four linguistic paradigms, which are: 1. the paradigm of intercultural communication, 2. the vision of bilingualism and linguistic contacts contained in the theoretical proposals of the Swiss school of language pedagogy and research into bilingualism (François Grosjean, Georges Lüdi, Bernard Py, and their students), 3. the paradigms which place text in the centre of linguistic research, i.e. text linguistics and discourse analysis, in view of the connection between a text that was created in the bilingual mode with the context of its creation and its interpretation, and 4. the interpretive semantics of François Rastier, together with the postulate to study each linguistic phenomenon in four descriptive orders: the syntagmatic, the paradigmatic, the hermeneutic and the referential. The theoretical-methodological framework of study of texts recorded in bilingual speech, is created by a number of research concepts suggested by these paradigms. In particular, 1. the concept of bilingual competence of a bilingual author as two verbal resources that he or she can exploit during the creation of text, 2. the concept of a bilingual person as someone who communicatively operates in two languages, 3. the concept of transcodic markers as the hyperonym for all the traces of encounters of two codes (L1 and L2) in the given text, as a result of the bilingualism of the author.
The second part of this paper is a description of bilingual speech recorded in three aspects, the formal, the functional, and the one relating to genre studies. As a textual phenomenon, bilingual speech is characterized by transcodic markers, the traces of encounters between two languages: the matrix language L1 and the embedded language L2. The author introduces into the text linguistic correlates of his or her bilingual competence. These can take the shape of code switching, code mixing, or interference between L1 and L2. Coherence mechanisms, adequate to the various forms of transcodic markers, weld transcodic markers with the text in the matrix language formally and with regard to the content. These mechanisms are: grammatical rules of code switching, the matrix language frame, the local grammatical, syntactic, and semantic congruence of the two linguistic systems in contact, and also the local convergence between the elements and rules of L1 and L2. Transcodic markers are created by bilingual authors to fulfil specific roles in texts, most importantly, to enhance the referential potential and to (de)nominate the text by opening up the access to the universe of reference of L2. Other functions are the deictic function, the metacommunicative function, the function of rendering utterances that have originally arisen in L2, the polyphonic function, and also the function of transmitting strong emotions which are intimate to the sender. Transcodic markers are a transgression of the monolingual norm which is typically considered the standard in the creation of written texts. However, the analysis of recorded bilingual speech has shown that there exist genres which not only accept the introduction of transcodic markers into the text, but even actually sanction them. On the one hand, it is the literature of personal document with such genres as letter, journal, memoirs (autobiography), and on the other, linguistic mediation. In the former case, transcodic markers verbalize genre-specific features, the documentary quality and the personal element, as they are a linguistic – and thus authentic – testimony of the experience that the author has had in his or her L2, and has formed in that language. Being an inalienable part of the experience that is being related, the second language warrants an assertion of truth, documented and narrated through the given text with bilingual speech. Transcodic markers introduce senses and content that is complementary to the text in the matrix language, which is why, for a bilingual author, they are a factor that enriches his or her linguistic repertoire in the text that they are creating.
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