Polish - English code-switching and other language contact phenomena in the speech of Polish migrants in the United Kingdom

This thesis is a presentation of the naturalistic speech of Polish migrants living in the United Kingdom and pays particular attention to the linguistic phenomena which r~sult from Polish-English language contact, with code-switching being the chief focus of this thesis. In this study I first present the phenomena in accordance . with Muysken's (2000) typology of code-switching and. then analyse them from syntactic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Specifically,· I explain why insertional switching is the predominant in the Polish community in the U K. I also track correlations between the occurrence and frequency of particular forms of codeswitching and (extra)1ingusitc variables such as length of stay and native/foreign language dominance and conclude that both language dominance and length of stay are important for the character of Polish-English code switching. A separate chapter of th is work is devoted to the switching of English disfluency markers on the example of the marker urn used by Polish speakers. Using pragmatic, auditory and acoustic analysis I prove that more frequent users of code-switching also tend to use English disfluency markers in their Polish and that the use of disfluency markers and other language contact phenomena occurring in the speech of Polish migrants living in the UK often overlap - particularly in the case of long-term migrants and second generation migrants.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo