Transference Markers: Verbal Devices for Marking Transference in the Speech of First Generation Italian-English Bilinguals in and Around Turangi

Abstract

This thesis is a study of aspects of the dynamics of conversation between bilinguals. It focuses on “transference markers”, described here as verbal devices used by speakers to mark off transfers in their speech. A corpus of recorded speech was compiled from one-to-one interviews with 37 first generation Italian-English bilinguals in a recently established Italian community in New Zealand. The many tokens of transference markers occurring in the corpus are described in four categories: vocal markers, prosodic and paralinguistic features; hesitation markers, silent and voiced pause, false start and repeat; hedges, direct and indirect; and glosses, synonymous and explicative. Such phenomena have been explained in the literature on bilingualism as markers of the social integration of transferred items. This thesis seeks to explain their interactive meaning in two ways: by a detailed description of examples from the corpus, and by statistical analysis of the incidence of transference markers in the corpus. The use of transference markers is found to correlate positively with "formal" language behaviour - use of V pronoun of address and of high prestige native language variety; and with “insecure” language competence - moderately good knowledge of L2 (English). Attention is drawn to the fact that many marking devices are interactive in requiring a response from the hearer. A pragmatic model of conversation, drawing mainly on the cooperative and politeness principles, is adopted to explain the ways in which transference markers are used by speakers to negotiate the terms on which "foreign" linguistic items are introduced into an interaction. Transference markers are thus shown to constitute a sub-set of those pragmatic particles whose function in conversation is to allow the contextualization of the interaction, through an exchange of signals between speaker and hearer. In this way interactants communicate information about their own, and each other's, conversational assumptions. In a dynamic, non-diglossic bilingual situation such as the one investigated here, linguistic norms are fluid, and. Speakers may be uncertain about how much and what kinds of transferred items will be understood by their interlocutor and what judgements the interlocutor will make about the speaker on the basis of the speaker’s use of transference. This may be true even among persons in frequent contact with each other. Between strangers, and especially between strangers in such situations as the interviews on which this thesis is based, the problems multiply. Transference markers are shown to be interactive strategies which allow bilingual speakers and hearers to overcome these problems and construct a workable ad hoc communicative norm.