| Monolingual, as well as bilingual, speakers have various codes at their disposition. However, bilinguals have access to codes that are said to belong to two different grammatical systems and can switch between codes. It is this phenomenon, code-switching (CS), that is the subject of this paper. Scholars have studied immigrant Puerto Rican communities in the continental United States, whereas CS on the island has received little attention. For that reason, I examine the code-switching patterns of a bilingual community in Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican Army National Guard (PRANG).; This study is ethnographic in scope and explores the patterns of language choice, individual motivations behind CS and the structure of code-switching. Analysis of the data is accomplished using the theoretical frameworks established by Ferguson's (1959) and Fishman's (1971) for the study of diglossia, Myers-Scotton's Markedness Model (1988, 1993, 1998) and Myers-Scotton (1999) and Myers-Scotton and Jake's Matrix Language Framework (2001). |
