MacSwan, Jeff. (1999). A Minimalist Approach To Intrasentential Code Switching . Reviewed by Pepi Leistyna, University of Massachusetts, Boston

MacSwan, Jeff. (1999). A Minimalist Approach To Intrasentential Code Switching . New York: Garland Publishing Reviewed by Pepi Leistyna University of Massachusetts, Boston xxvi + 305 pp. $72         ISBN 0-8153-3274-2 June 1, 2000 Unfortunately, the field of Linguistics has traditionally been couched in a positivist discourse that disallows those working within the paradigm to consciously or overtly take a political and ethical stance on the implications of their research. Engaged in a dialogue with Noam Chomsky, a scholar whose political work is often disassociated from his linguistic theories, I asked him what he felt the role of intellectuals should be "in terms of offering a public counter-discourse that links violence and social decay to structural flaws and undemocratic practices?" Chomsky responded, The job of the honest intellectual is to help out people who need help; to be part of the people who are struggling for rights and justice. That's what you should be doing. But of course, you don't expect to be rewarded for that. (Quoted in Leistyna, 1999, p. 120) Jeff MacSwan, in his new book A Minimalist Approach To Intrasentential Code Switching, makes a concerted effort to bridge the gap among theory, research, and practice. As a linguist with a social conscience, whose book was deservedly published in Garland's Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series, MacSwan bridges the linguistic with the educational, the empirical with the political, and the moral with the practical. Based on the Minimalist Program developed by Noam Chomsky in 1995, the book is primarily centered on the grammatical properties of code switching—where the author defines a code switcher as "an individual who alternately uses two or more languages at or below sentential boundaries, and who has had continual, sustained exposure and practice in these languages since infancy" (p.22). This study of language mixing between Nahuatl (also known as Mexicano or Aztec) and Spanish was conducted in the Tehuacan Valley, mostly in San Sebastian Zinacatepec. Of its population of approximately seven thousand, there are "about 65% bilingual in Spanish and Nahuatl and about 31.5% monolingual in Spanish...only 271 residents (about 3.9%) are monlingual in Nahuatl" (p.92). Now a minority language in Mexico, Nahuatl was once the dominant mode of communication throughout the Aztec empire. However, since in the early fifteen hundreds, with the conquests by Cortez, the indigenous people have found themselves shackled to over four centuries of enslavement and exploitation. MacSwan acknowledges that despite of such revolutionary efforts as those of Emiliano Zapata, Nahuatl is now spoken by the most impoverished and disenfranchised people in the country. Chapter One sets the critical tone of the book by immediately debunking the omnipresent stigma around code switching. Using significant literature in critical social theory, the author ruptures any notion of prescriptivism—the idea that some languages are more valuable than others. Instead, he believes that "all human beings possess languages and language varieties of equal richness and complexity" (p.255). MacSwan also cogently contests the claims about semilingualism and cognitive deficiency models which insist that children who code switch have deficient language abilities in both of their languages. Contesting Hansegard's "six criteria for semilingualism," and revising Cummins's "Threshold Hypothesis" and "Linguistic Interdependence Principle" (eventually arguing in Chapter Six that language is independent of literacy and content area knowledge), the author argues that "fluent bilinguals who code switch have the same rich linguistic competence as monolinguals for the languages they use..." (p.5). He passionately contends that viewing bilingual code switchers as linguistically incompetent is not only morally unjust, but scientifically unsubstantiated. Chapter Two provides the reader with a review of some of the most popular literature associated with the grammatical aspects of code switching. MacSwan begins to challenge research by Gumperz (1970, 1976), Timm (1975), Wentz (1977), Pfaff (1979), Poplack (1980, 1981), Joshi (1985), Di Sciullo, Muysken, and Singh (1986), Azuma (1991, 1993), de Bot (1992), Mahootian (1993), Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio (1994), and Myers-Scotton (1993, 1995). Along the way, he provides the reader with useful heuristics such as charts that juxtapose competing ideas. This chapter also lays out the basic framework of the Minimalist Program. MacSwan states that The central, leading aim of Chomsky's (1995) minimalist program is the elimination of all mechanisms that are not necessary and essential on conceptual grounds alone; thus only the minimal theoretical assumptions may be made to account for linguistic data, privileging more simplistic and elegant accounts over complex and cumbersome ones. (p.146) MacSwan then addresses the historical connections between Spanish and Nahautl—two languages that are genetically and typologically unrelated. Nahautl belongs to the Uto- Aztecan family and is often thought of as polysynthetic, while Spanish is a member of the Romance subfamily of Indo-European and is considered synthetic. Recognizing that these two languages differ in terms of productive noun incorporation, object agreement morphology, and the availability of infinitival constructions, MacSwan nonetheless treats Nahuatl as having phrase structure that is "minimally different from Spanish, English and other well-studied languages" (p.77). This chapter also effectively contextualizes the sociohistorical conditions of Nahuatl speakers in Central Mexico. With the critical flavors of Howard Zinn, amomg others, the author provides some interesting history and demographic statistics about indigenous people, pointing out a long history of oppression in which the use of Spanish has been referred to as "speaking Christian", and indigenous languages are "heathen tongues." It thus comes as no surprise that the research participants in MacSwan's study were largely unaware that the Aztec Empire spoke their very language, or that it held a written form. The auther states that "intensive propaganda in the schools and mass media have robbed them of the linguistic and ethnic heritage of their communities" (p.91). He notes that it is only recently, in response to resistance in Chiapas, that the Mexican government has begun to provide bilingual education. However, MacSwan insists that without a real redistribution of power, indigenous cultures will remain oppressed in history. Chapter Three walks the reader through the study's research methodologies, participants, and central research question: "What linguistic principles define code switching boundaries?" (p.97). A number of ambitious subquestions follow: What are the descriptive facts of Spanish-Nahuatl code switching in Southeast Puebla? How do the Spanish-Nahuatl data differ from those of other code switching corpora: What might explain conflicting findings? Does the Functional Head Constraint of Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio (1994) account for the Spanish- Nahuatl code switching data? Does the "Null Theory" of code switching proposed in Mahootian (1993) account for the Spanish-Nahuatl code switching data? Does the MFL Model of Myers-Scotton (1993) account for the Spanish-Nahuatl data? Can minimalist grammars explain the Spanish-Nahuatl data: If so, what are their advantages? Can a minimalist account be extended to data from other code switching corpora? In a well crafted attempt to answer this plethora of demanding questions, data was collected through naturalistic observation and sentence judgment tasks. MacSwan pointed out that, "While naturalistic data may be useful for obtaining initial findings in a natural setting, it does not tell us what cannot occur; thus it is of somewhat limited use in constructing a theory of the sort pursued here" (p.102). Avoiding the possible effects of a critical period in language development, MacSwan made certain that all of his research participants were bilingual since infancy. They were also from communities in which there was little stigma around code switching so uninhibited, natural interaction could occur. Such fertile conditions bore the necessary fruit for sustaining MacSwan's eventual counter-arguments to existing claims about code switching, as presented in Chapter Five. Chapter Four provides an annotated descriptive catalogue of the researcher's findings, which includes a focus on conjunctions and because, that complement, other embedded clauses, negation, quantifiers and nonreferential quantified NPs, demonstratives, determiners, Nahuatl in and Spanish nouns, modification structures, switches involving subject and object pronouns, clitics, and bound morphemes. MacSwan also delves into intersentential switches, verbs, prepositions, C-elements, D-elements, word- internal instances of code switching, adverbs, pronouns and agreement morphemes, and interjections. In Chapter Five, using counter-examples from his own data, MacSwan effectively challenges existing theories of code switching, including Poplack's (1980, 1981) Equivalence Constraint which claims that a code switch is permitted between constituents only if the relevant word order requirements of the two languages are met at S-structure; Joshi's (1985) Closed Class Constraint which states that a switch into the "embedded language" may not occur at the boundary of a closed-class item; Di Sciullo, Muysken, and Singh's (1986) Government Constraint in which a code switch cannot occur where the government relation holds; Mahootian's (1993) idea that the language of a head determines the phrase structure position of its complements in code switching just as in monolingual contexts; Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio's (1994) Functional Head Constraint which concludes that a code switch can not occur between a functional head and its complement; and Myers-Scotton's Matrix Language Frame (1993, 1995) where it is proposed that the matrix language defines the surface structure positions for content words and functional elements. Working through these various postulates about the rules governing language mixing, MacSwan, with detailed examples, concludes that according to the minimal code switching-specific apparatus, nothing constrains code switching apart from the requirements of mixed grammars. It is important to note here that he is not arguing that there is no such thing as an unacceptable code switch—the term constrain is used "in its technical sense in syntactic theory, entailing that there are no statements, rules or principles of grammar which refer to code switching" (p.146). He makes the basic argument that regardless of the surface languages being used, "they do not enter into the apparatus of syntactic theory, and should play no role in an account of code switching" (p.146). He elaborates, ...it entails that we ignore the identities of particular languages for the purposes of linguistic theory. The language faculty (and associated learning principles) is a generating function which selects a particular language Lx or Ly (...Ln), given input from Lx or Ly (...Ln). Thus, the value of L determined by the language faculty crucially may not be a construct in linguistic theory; its value is derived, determined by UG (and associated learning principles). (p.146) MacSwan concludes this chapter by suggesting some prospects for further empirical exploration. Although the research in this new book was conducted in Mexico, it is entirely relevant to educators in the United States. The U.S. has always engendered multilingualism and the blending of codes. Aware of this linkage, in Chapter Six, MacSwan challenges current educational practices in this country and suggests more critical and democratic possibilities for the future. He points out the Census Bureau's reported increase of about one hundred percent limited English proficient enrollment nationwide in schools —especially Spanish speaking populations. The author acknowledges and contests the harsh reality that there are many groups in this society, especially African American, Asian, Latino/a, and Native American, that are abused, mislabeled, and denied their own linguistic and cultural identities. In particular, MacSwan rebuts negative beliefs about intrasentential code switching practices in the classroom, such as Jacobson's (1983), whose basic premise is that if there is intrasentetial code switching then "the child is not exposed long enough to any one language to derive from the teacher's talk the grammatical, semantic and lexical rules of English nor Spanish" (1983, p.5). Instead, MacSwan counters that in fact intrasentential mixing embodies a natural use of language and should be nurtured. He eloquently states, "A worthwhile language arts curriculum, rather than targeting stigmatized language for 'remediation,' should use language diversity as a resource" (p.255). Understanding that language is inextricably related to culture and identity, and a major proponent of the idea that "code switching enhances rather than limits the expressive capacity of an individual" (p.250), MacSwan supports the Ann Arbor legal decision that "asserts the legal responsibility of schools to understand the language situations of the children they educate, and to treat their home language as equally legitimate as the home language of any other child" (p.19). He offers suggestions about more just and equitable language policies and educational practices dealing with the language arts curriculum, bilingualism, and assessment—hopes that resemble what proponents of multicultural/multilingual education such as Lilia Bartolome (1996) refer to as a "culturally responsive" and "humanizing pedagogy." The implications of MacSwan's research for rupturing the dominant racist mistreatment of linguistic minority students—a deficit model of representation that informs unjust pedagogical practices and institutional tracking—are enormous. For as Gloria Anzaldua (1990) argues, If you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.... As A Minimalist Approach to Intrasentential Code Switching expands linguistic theory, it is complex in many respects. Given the Minimalist discourse within which it functions, it may be difficult at some points for readers who are unfamiliar with Chomsky's work in linguistics, and with the lingo of research. However, it is definitely worth the struggle for linguists and educators alike, especially language instructors who have been deskilled in teacher education programs, to read this book with great vigor and care. Perhaps most importantly, this new book makes an enormous contribution by exposing the reader to the essential role of praxis. MacSwan, in the spirit of Chomsky's words ("The job of the honest intellectual is to help out people who need help; to be part of the people who are struggling for rights and justice....") ruptures the false binarism that has been constructed between theory and practice, and between research and social agency. Used in connection with research that takes up the pragmatic and sociopsychological aspects of code switching, such as Ben Rampton's (1995) book Crossing Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents, MacSwan's new book is a must for linguists, language teachers, and cultural workers of all kinds who hope to bring about more liberatory forms of education. References Anzaldua, G. (1990). How to tame a wild tongue. In R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. Minh-ha, & C. West (Eds.), Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures (pp. 207). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 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