grammatical constraints and motivations for - University of the ...

eferred to as RO) sets between participants…” in any given type of interaction.
The unmarked RO set is derived from the situational features that are most
important in the community for that type of interaction.
The markedness model accounts for social motivations for all types of
codeswitching, based on the ‘negotiation principle.’ This principle implies that
speakers choose the form of their conversation contribution in a way that indicates
the set of RO’s that they wish to enforce between speaker and addressee in a
particular exchange (Myers-Scotton, 1993a). According to Myers-Scotton (cited
in Pütz, 1992: 418), the negotiation principle and the maxims that are associated
with it “… encapsulate the human predisposition to use code choices as
implicating intentional context about presentations of self and/or perceptions of
rights and obligations holding between self and others.” This negotiation principle
underlies the motivations for codeswitching and rests on the following maxims:
2.4.1.1 The ‘unmarked-choice’ maxim
This maxim directs speakers to make their code choice the unmarked index of the
unmarked RO set in exchanges when they wish to establish or affirm that RO set.
(Myers-Scotton, 1993a, Coulmas, 2005)
Following this maxim results in codeswitching as a sequence of unmarked
choices- codeswitching as a result of change in situational factors during
conversation- or as unmarked codeswitching - speakers engage in a continuous
pattern of using two or more languages.
Codeswitching as an unmarked choice occurs “… in cases where it is expected
that a person with the sociolinguistic profile of the speaker will wish to index the
social identities associated with two or more codes in the same conversation and
therefore the speaker switches between these codes to invoke simultaneous
identities.” (Myers-Scotton, cited in Pütz, 1992: 419)
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