A syntactic and functional analysis of language choice and code switching among Arab celebrities

This thesis is an examination of the use of code switching among Arab celebrities in Kuwait, Lebanon and Egypt, where they can be heard switching into English or French during T.V. talk shows. Specifically, this study is an analysis of the social functions of code switching, on the one hand, and the syntactic principles or constraints that regulate it on the other. Five celebrities were chosen as the study population. A total of 72 conversational turns were analyzed.;A number of frameworks were integrated to analyze the data pragmatically: Blom and Gumperz (1972), Gumperz (1982), Bell (1984), Appel and Muysken (1987), and Mahootian (2012). The functional analysis revealed that Bell's (1984) audience design and referee design underlie code switching occurrences in the data of this study. I concluded that the prestige and the 'hip' status of English (as a sign of modernity) in the Arab world are strong motivations for celebrities to include English in their conversations. Hence, they use linguistic choices to present a status identity and to show membership in their professional communities as well (Mahootian, 2012). Across all five celebrities, code switching appeared to serve specific functions such as situational, metaphorical, reiteration, message qualification, personalization vs objectivization, directive, expressive, phatic, and metalinguistic functions. However, there was a complete lack of occurrence of certain functions such as quotation, referential and addressee specification . I propose that the reason for the absence of the latter functions is primarily due to the fact that the language contact contexts are so different; in the communities studied by Gumperz (1982), where the two languages used by bilinguals are spoken consistently on a daily basis, whereas in the communities I studied, there is a dominant language spoken, Arabic, and the use of English for most people on a daily basis is minimal, and restricted to specific functions.;The syntactic analysis showed that switches between Arabic and English and Arabic and French occur at the lexical, phrasal and sentential levels, including between free and bound morphemes and nouns and adjectives. Particularly, switches were found between V and DP, D and NP, Comp and DP, P and DP, and Q and DP, evidencing the empirical adequacy of the Head Complement Principle model (Mahootian, 1993, 1996). Counter-examples to Poplack's (1980) Free Morpheme Constraint, which prohibits switching between free and bound morphemes, are found. Finally, the data includes instances of switches between adjectives and nouns, which present counter-evidence to previous models that predicted such switches would not occur.