Metalanguaging and discourse markers in bilingual conversation

This study examines the functions of the bilingual discourse strategy of language alternation in the process of marking boundaries of continuous discourse. The focus is on switched discourse markers – employed, it is argued, to metalanguage the frame of the discourse. The corpus is comprised of audio recordings of over 20 hours of Hebrew-English bilingual conversation. The strategy of language alternation at discourse markers is illustrated, and the switched discourse markers are classified according to Becker's approach to context (1988b) as a source of constraints on text. This classification is then related to the phenomenon of clustering of discourse markers at discourse unit boundaries in both bilingual and monolingual discourse. Finally, cross-linguistic differences in discourse markers are related to a theory of metalanguage. (Discourse analysis, bilingual discourse, discourse markers, languaging, metalanguage, Hebrew/English comparative discourse)