ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overall explanation of code-switching, using primarily an East African data base. The model developed focuses on social consequences as motivating linguistic code choices and how speakers use conversational implicatures to arrive at the intended consequences. Switching away from the unmarked choice in a conventionalized exchange signals that the speaker is trying to negotiate a different rights and obligations balance as salient in place of the unmarked one, given the situational features. An explanation for code-switching has been proposed which emphasizes linguistic choices as negotiations of personal rights and obligations relative to those of other participants in a talk exchange. The markedness model most crucially consists of a negotiation principle and a set of maxims which participants in conversation use to calculate conversational implicatures about the balance of rights and obligations which the speaker proposes for the present speech event.
