Communicative styles of code-switching in service encounters: The frames manipulation and ideologies of ‘authenticity’ in institutional discourse

Authors

  • Gabriela Prego Vázquez Universidade de Santiago de Compostela Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v4i2.371

Keywords:

CODE-SWITCHING, SPANISH/GALICIAN, SERVICE ENCOUNTERS, CONVERSATIONALISATION AND MOTHERESE STYLES, POWER, FRAME MANIPULATION AND IDEOLOGICAL LAYERING OF LANGUAGES

Abstract

This paper analyses the role of code-switching in professional discourse in a corpus of 80 recorded interviews between employees of a Galician partly state-owned water utility company and customers from a multi-method approach. Drawing on the Ethnography of Communication, Conversation Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Sociolinguistics or Critical Ethnography, instances of code-switching are subjected to socio-discursive, sequential and critical analyses to understand the role it plays as a strategic resource to control the interaction in professional discourse. The findings reveal that employees use the conversational function of code-switching, that is, ‘personalisation versus objectivisation’, to mask interactional asymmetries between the participants. Specifically, switches from Spanish to Galician indexing ‘personal’ and ‘didactic footings’ emerge in the course of depersonalised, ‘objective’ professional discourse. The paper discusses the sociodiscursive role of code-switching in reproducing new ways in which power is exercised, namely conversationalisation (Fairclough 1997) and motherese (Wodak 1996) in a professional discourse setting.

Author Biography

  • Gabriela Prego Vázquez, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
    Gabriela Prego Vázquez is Profesora Titular of Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). She received her PhD in the Discourse and Society Programme (Linguistics Department) from University of A Coruña. Her areas of interest include Interactional Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis. She has published articles on the discursive processes and practices involved in the negotiation of social identities in face-to-face interaction in journals such as Discourse and Society, Pragmatics, Estudios de Sociolingüística and RILI. She is a member of the Koine Research Group (http://www.usc.es/koine).

Published

2011-01-16

How to Cite

Prego Vázquez, G. (2011). Communicative styles of code-switching in service encounters: The frames manipulation and ideologies of ‘authenticity’ in institutional discourse. Sociolinguistic Studies, 4(2), 371-412. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v4i2.371