Ben Nafa, Hanan (2018) Code-switching As An Evaluative .

AcknowledgementsFirst, I would like to express my gratitude to my Director of Studies: Dr. RobDrummond for his continued support and interest in my research topic. I would also liketo thank my first supervisor Dr. Derek Bousfield for his support and guidance. I amparticularly full of gratitude to my second supervisor Dr. Stella Bullo for her invaluableadvice, care about my wellbeing and the tremendous support she gave me, particularlyat the final critical stages of my PhD.I also thank my family, particularly my mom and my wonderful sisters: Samar andSarah for their support. A special thanks to my little nephews: Anas and Mohammed andour cat: Judy for contributing to my wellbeing throughout this journey.I would also like to dedicate a special thanks to my five friends for being myparticipants without whom my PhD thesis would not have come together.A big thanks to all my colleagues and friends with whom I spent my time at thePhD student room. I thank Cat, Spencer, Jon, Martin, Steph, Holly, Chris, Isabel, Andreaand Polly for their support and the fun/hard moments we had together and the drafts weshared. I also thank my friends Umama, Ala and Hala for their love and support.Finally, I would like to thank Deborah Bown, the faculty’s research degreesadministrator, for her kind, prompt replies and support with paperwork.xi

1: Introduction1.2 About the studyThis is an ethnographic study that investigates the code-switching (henceforward CS)practices utilised in the informal interactions of five adult, female, Arabic-Englishbilingual friends, who are part of the Arabic-speaking minority in Manchester, England.The aim of the study is to examine the ways and the extent to which the CS instancesdeployed by these bilingual participants are utilised as a linguistic resource in positioningthemselves and negotiating their identities. In doing so, the study explores the indexicalrelationship between the CS stylistic variability that members of this group exhibit andtheir negotiation of certain aspects of their interactional identities (defined in section2.2.4). The specific identity aspects explored in this thesis are the participants’evaluative stances, particularly those of ‘attitude’, and how they may be expressedthrough the participants’ individual and relational CS moves.To investigate identity-related issues of CS, the study analyses the subjects’ CSpatterns at a local level and from a stance viewpoint to conduct an examination of theindividual (personal) and interactional (interpersonal) dimensions of the speakers’ CSinstances. A moment-by-moment analysis of informal interactions between theparticipants is conducted to examine, through adopting the APPRAISAL1 model (Martin& White, 2005), how these bilingual speakers make a range of CS moves while taking updifferent evaluative stances and positioning themselves during peer-group interactions.It is hypothesised that CS is a resourceful means through which speakersnegotiate aspects of their interactional identities. The cumulative stance-taking actstaken up by the study’s participants, through their CS instances, are expected to befound to function as a significant tool through which the participants are linguisticallyable to express their attitudes and therefore negotiate and manage their identities while1Based on the conventions followed in the appraisal literature, the word ‘appraisal’ will be capitalised throughout, to distinguish itas an analytic tool.1

interacting with each other.The study investigates the following research questions:1. How do members of this bilingual group utilise CS as a tool for selfpresentation and for negotiating both their individual and relational identities?2. How can variability in the participants’ CS patterns be explained in relation tothe different evaluative stances they take and the attitudes they express?3. What are the communicative effects speakers achieve through the evaluativestances they take and their interactional management of CS?The thesis is structured as follows. The remainder of this introduction discusses therationale behind the study and its potential contribution to knowledge. The final sectionof the chapter offers a brief account of the research context and the history of the Arabpresence in Manchester. The two literature review chapters provide a comprehensivereview of the three main concepts in this thesis: CS, identity, and stance, and highlightthe ways in which these concepts are interlinked. While the first part of the literaturereview focuses on the way CS/language choice and identity are linked, the second partof it highlights the indexical role of stance in mediating between language use andlinguistic variation, and identity re-construction. This chapter ends with a detailedoverview of the study’s main analytic tool, the APPRAISAL model, and a justification foradopting it as a tool for analysing the participants’ attitudinal positions realised throughtheir CS moves. The chapter also includes a detailed discussion of the extent of the roleplayed by culture in accounting for (bilingual) speakers’ attitudes. The methodologychapter describes the main methodological frameworks that informed the collection ofthe study’s data and the process of analysis. This chapter also discusses in detail the wayin which the current thesis draws several theories and analytic approaches fromdifferent practices within Sociolinguistics, such as Interactional Sociolinguistics(henceforward IS) and Systematic Functional Linguistics (henceforward SFL), developinglinks between study areas such as APPRAISAL and CS. The results chapter focuses on the2

participants’ identity-related CS instances and their evaluative significance. The nextchapter provides a detailed discussion of these identity-related CS instances and thethree main attitudinal positions the participants express (AFFECT, APPRECIATION andJUDGEMENT) through their evaluative CS moves. The discussion chapter ends with asection discussing the main contribution this study makes and its implications for theAPPRAISAL theory as well as the study’s limitations regarding its application ofAPPRAISAL. The conclusion chapter provides a summary of the research questions ofthis thesis and the way in which each has been answered. It also ends with suggestionsfor possible directions for future work and collaboration between the study areas of CSand APPRAISAL.1.2 The study’s rationale and contribution to knowledgeIn a move away from traditional approaches, where bilinguals’ identities were viewedas tied to dichotomous associations with either language (e.g. Arabic vs English), manyrecent CS studies have incorporated ‘stance’ as an analytic approach (Jaffe, 2009). Suchstudies address how different CS moves are used to shift speakers’ stances and(re)construct unique bilingual identities. However, one specific communicative purposefor which CS is deployed which still has not been examined in the existing studies of CSand that is linked to negotiating bilingual identities, is that of performing evaluation andexpressing attitudes through CS. In my Master’s thesis (Ben Nafa, 2013), one of theemerging CS patterns exhibited by the group (the same group of participants as for thisPhD study) is its preference for utilising English to express emotions and promote selfimage. Therefore, the main aim of this PhD thesis is to investigate this further andexamine the way in which these bilingual participants utilise CS to express their attitudesand negotiate their interpersonal identities.This thesis is attempting to make a number of contributions to the area of CS, inaddition to its evident additions to the field of Sociolinguistics in general. Byinvestigating the linguistic construction of identity through CS instances occurring at ahigh or discourse level (i.e., beyond the utterance level), the current study firstendeavours to enrich the body of knowledge already existing on negotiating identity,which mainly focuses on lower-level (phonetic and morphosyntactic) variables. In doing3

so, it also adds to the emerging area of research into CS from an identity-relatedperspective (Pérez-casas, 2008; Chen, 2008); an area where studies such as the currentone tend to be scarce.Although there is a scarcity in such studies across different language pairs, thegap in the research area of Arabic-English CS is particularly noticeable. The secondcontribution for this thesis is, therefore, filling this gap in the research existing on ArabicEnglish CS by exploring how this group of Arabic-English bilinguals ‘do’ identity work andre-construct aspects of their identities. In addition to the overall ‘lack of a theoreticalfoundation for discussing code switching behaviours of English-Arabic [and ArabicEnglish] bilinguals’ (Al-Rowais, 2012:23), hardly any research has been done on theidentity-related issues of Arabic-English CS practices. Apart from the few studies thathave approached CS from a sociolinguistic/pragmatic point of view, the focus has usuallybeen confined to exploring a pre-existing set of practical functions behind theparticipants’ act of switching (Abalhassan & Alshalawi, 2000; Abu Mathkour, 2004;Othman, 2006; Mohammed et al., 2015). Even when reference is made to identitynegotiation, it is either very brief, describing basic CS instances (Al-Hourani, 2016;Mkahal, 2016), or the participants’ identities are only viewed in terms of a set of macrolevel variables such as age, gender, and level of education (Hafez, 2015).Another contribution of this project is focusing on a bilingual group - latebilinguals2 - that has not been investigated as much as the other groups (early bilinguals).The CS patterns exhibited in the speech of adult sojourners3 or late bilinguals belongingto a range of minority groups are hardly studied in the literature of CS (The term‘sojourner’ will be discussed in more detail in section 1.3.3 below where I also show howit is different from that of ‘immigrant’). Conversely, the CS patterns of early bilinguals regardless of the language pair they speak - have been well covered (e.g. Jørgensen,1998; Al-Rowais, 2012; Gardner-Chloros & Finnis, 2004).2It is generally believed that late bilinguals are those who acquired their L2 after the age of 10 or 11/12 (Luk, et al., 2011:588, 590;Kim et al., 1997:171-4, respectively). However, this ‘cut-off age’ is considered by many, such as, Yow & Li (2015:2), to be ‘somewhatarbitrary’.3 Someone who has chosen to live abroad for a specific period of time, short or long (Block, 2014:38).4

The final and most important contribution of this study, which ismethodologically-related, is the adoption of the APPRAISAL model as an analytic toolthat systematically investigates the evaluative stances behind the CS moves the currentstudy’s participants deploy. The exploration of the evaluative (attitudinal) potential ofthe participants’ CS moves was only possible and examined effectively through theincorporation of the APPRAISAL system in my analysis of the participants’ evaluative CSpractice. The APPRAISAL model was utilised in developing a theoretical framework thatI proposed (see section 3.2, chapter 3) in order to examine the attitudinal stancesinferred from the participants’ CS instances. The main benefit of incorporatingAPPRAISAL was apparent in its ability to identify the linguistic choices(lexicogrammatical and discourse-semantic) that the bilingual participants exploit totake up attitudinal stances. Through using a text-based parsing tool such as APPRAISAL,the study proves how this model allows for a refined analysis of the interactional andattitudinal motivation behind the CS practice of the participants. To the best of myknowledge, very few studies (Bock, 2011; Baumgarten & Du Bois, 2012; SmithChristmas, 2013) have adopted the APPRAISAL framework to investigate bilingualinteractions and the way participants experience their reality and react to it throughtheir CS moves. Therefore, the current study is one of the very early and very few CSstudies that utilises the APPRAISAL model in examining the evaluative potential of CSand its role in negotiating and re-constructing interactional bilingual identities. Theintroduction of the APPRAISAL framework, which is a model that is conceptualisedwithin the area of SFL, could lead to developing useful links between the two fields - CSand SFL - in future works.1.3 Context of the studyThis section gives an overview of the context in which the study is carried out - a minorityArabic community in the city of Manchester. It first provides an account of the status ofArabic in Manchester and the role it plays in shaping its multilingual landscape. Then,the section reviews the history of the migration of Arabs to England and Manchester. Indoing so, it provides general remarks on the linguistic and social situation of the Arabcommunities in England/Manchester, focusing on the main reasons behind theirpresence, both as expats and students, in the UK as a whole. In some parts, the following5

section focuses specifically on the Libyan community, as five of the study’s participants,including me, are from Libya. It is worth drawing attention to the social atmosphere andcontext in which the study’s participants find themselves, thus indirectly giving insightsinto their world views and linguistic practices.1.3.1 Multilingual ManchesterManchester is currently home to a large number of ethnic minorities and immigrantcommunities whose two hundred languages make it the ‘most linguistically diverse cityin Western Europe’ (Brown, 2013:online). For over sixty years, Manchester has been thetarget of endless waves of immigration from different parts of the world (MultilingualManchester, 2013:1). As many of these communities tend to maintain their heritagelanguages, it is not surprising to know that almost half of the young population ofManchester is either bilingual or multilingual (Ibid).According to research carried out regarding the language profile of Manchester,Arabic is the second most spoken community language in the city (MultilingualManchester, 2015:4). It is mainly spoken in certain areas in south Manchester, such asHulme (Multilingual Manchester, 2013:2) and the Cheetham Hill area in NorthManchester. As a way in which they can maintain Arabic, most Arabs are keen to sendtheir children to Arabic schools at weekends in Manchester (Othman, 2006:70) as is thecase in most other cities in England. In addition to maintaining their heritage language,many Muslim, first generation Arab immigrants utilise the Arabic schools as a means ofmaking sure their children are literate in Arabic and have access to an environmentwhere Arabic is the main medium of instruction and interaction. Furthermore, manyArabs regard Arabic schools as a significant means through which they help theirchildren retain their cultural and religious identity, which is tied, to a great extent, toArabic, the language of Islam and the Quran.1.3.2 Arabs in England and ManchesterThe presence of Arabs in the UK, particularly England, dates back to 1945, with thebeginning of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (McRoy, no date). England was one of the6

main countries to which many Palestinian refugees fled after the state of Israel wasestablished. The decades after this (1960s-1990s) witnessed more immigration fromdifferent Arabic countries, including Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Libya, and Morocco(Seddon, 2012:16). The majority of Arabs who immigrated around this period wereeither seeking political asylum or better employment/educational opportunities(Seddon, 2012:17). According to the 2011 UK census (cited in The National Associationof British Arabs, 2013:6), around ‘366,769’ first and second generation Arabs arecurrently settled in London, rendering them the largest Arabic community in England.Second to London, Manchester is home to the largest Arabic community (around 9,500residents), which makes up 1.9 % of its total population4 (Manchester City Council,2015:28-29). Classified as ‘residents from the ‘other’ broad ethnic group’ in Manchester,this ‘Arabic subgroup [is] now the 6th largest in England and Wales (Manchester citycouncil, 2015:29). This number/percentage, moreover, is likely to have risen since 2011(the year of the most recent UK census) when the recent arrival of many Syrian andLibyan refugees is taken into account. For example, more than five thousand Syrianrefugees have recently arrived in the Greater Manchester area; a number that is likelyto rise over the next few years, according to UK officials (Williams, 2016).1.3.2.1 Libyans in ManchesterAlthough there are some claims for North London to be ‘home to the UK's largestexpatriate Libyan community’ (Barford & Chrystal, 2011), there is a very strong sensethat the Libyan presence in Manchester is in fact larger (Wilson, 2012), with around 5000residents (O’Neil & Norfolk, 2017). It is even widely claimed that the Libyan communityin Manchester is the ‘biggest one outside Libya’ (Seddon, 2012:17), and not just in theUK. Because of this presence, some would also go as far as calling Manchester ‘Libya’ssecond capital’ (Smith & Yeginsu, 2017:online). The start of the Libyan community inManchester was marked by the arrival of many Libyan political activists and asylumseekers, some of whom were prominent opponents of Gaddafi. They were impelled tomigrate in the 1980s and early 1990s to escape his regime at its most brutal.4This percentage is based on the most recent UK census, that is 2011 census (

Ben Nafa, Hanan (2018) Code-switching as an evaluative strategy: identity construction among Arabic-English bilinguals in Manchester. Doctoral thesis