ABSTRACT
In the following chapter, Rita Franceschini aims at integrating bilingual speech (including code-switching) into a more general linguistic approach which is based on flexibility and variability rather than timeless stability and situation-transcending constancy. Instead of taking the highly codified standard languages (of Europe or elsewhere) as the starting point, she proposes to move mixed codes, code-switching and other manifestations of linguistic variability and flexibility among bilinguals into the centre of linguistic thinking and theorising, which, up to the present, has been dominated by monolingual views of the human language capacity. One of her arguments for such an approach is similar to the one presented by Alvarez-Cáccamo in Chapter 2: bilingual speech cannot be equated with conversational code-switching, which is functional and therefore presupposes the ‘underlying’ existence of two ‘codes’ (languages) seen as as separate entities by the participants.
