– Recent Spanish Department Distinction Honors –
Courtney Guertin, 2013 – Mia Mundo: Code Switching in a Spanish-English Bilingual Television Series.
Code switching is a characteristic of many bilingual communities. Not to be confused with “Span-glish,” code switching has linguistic rules and proper uses, just as there are linguistic formalities in English or Spanish. In her distinction project, Courtney explored the representation and use of Code switching in Spanish-English bilingual television, specifically the popular television program “Mía Mundo,” analyzing the code switches used by the main character Mia. Through the research of intersentential code switching (code switching that occurs between sentences) and intrasentential code switching (code switching occurring within a sentence), she concluded that none of Mia’s code switching violated linguistic constraints on code switching. Conclusions revealed that the code switching taking place in Mía Mundo did not seem to correspond with the functions of code switching reflected in literature. Further, Courtney found that the small percentage of intrasentential code switching occurring in Mia’s speech does not reflect the behavior of a bilingual Latino with a high level of competence in both languages.
Courtney Guertin ’13 presents her Departmental Distinction Project