Pieter Muysken, Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 306. Hb $ 59.95.

Abstract

Bilingual speech takes research on code-mixing a step further toward achieving a better understanding of the differences in what in the past has been referred to simply as the mixing of two languages in the sentence (or intrasentential code-switching). In addition, Muysken presents the state of the discipline of language contact in the year 2000 from the perspective of the grammar and structure of language contact phenomena. He brings together and analyzes an extensive set of language pairs from a wide variety of communities and social contexts. Good familiarity with such varied multilingual data provides the author with a strong base on which to support his three-way classification (insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalization) of code-mixing phenomena at the sentence level.