ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with code-switching in a specific sense. It discusses a theory of conversational code-alternation which should be applicable to a wide range of conversational phenomena subsumed in the literature under such headings as code-switching, language choice, transfer/insertion etc., and to very different bilingual communities and settings. The chapter shows that it is not only discourse-related language alternation that must be given a conversational, sequential analysis, but other types of language alternation as well. A promising alternative approach to code-alternation might therefore consist of analysing the signalling value of the juxtaposition of languages and deriving the conversational meaning of code-alternation from it. Code-alternation can and should be investigated on the conversational level as a contextualisation cue because it shares the features with other contextualisation cues. Striking evidence for such a contrastive signalling value of language alternation comes from one of the reportedly most frequent functions of code-alternation: the setting off of reported speech against its surrounding conversational context.
