Sociolinguistic analysis of the discourse of Puerto Rican university students

The fundamental purpose of this investigation was to carry out a broad based analysis of the speech of bilingual students in the University of Puerto Rico, which included specific linguistic aspects traditionally found to be susceptible to linguistic change in both monolingual and bilingual communities as well as phenomena related to linguistic influence, characteristic of many bilingual speech varieties. The specific syntactical areas studied were the use of verb forms and tenses, mood selection, lexicon and the identification of anglicisms and code-switching. Three specific groups of speakers in the sample were considered for the purpose of this contrastive study: monolingual Spanish-speaking students who have had very little contact with English and who possess only passive knowledge of this language, coordinate bilingual students who evaluate themselves as good speakers of English yet feel that Spanish is their dominant language and speakers who evaluate themselves as English dominant . In order to select the sample, students completed a questionnaire which would facilitate a clear socio-linguistic profile of each one. Among the principal items presented in the questionnaire were the following: students' self-evaluation of language proficiency in Spanish and English, the type of school (Puerto Rico or the United States) in which the subjects had received their elementary and secondary education (public or private), their language of preference with different interlocutors (friends, family, classmates) and the use of code-switching as well as their attitudes toward this speech phenomenon. A total of sixty subjects, primarily freshmen students on campus registered in first year English courses in the College of General Studies as well as other colleges constituted the sample. The interviews of each subject were taped with the consent of each subject and consisted of a minimum of forty minutes, carried out in an informal setting in order to achieve the highest levels of colloquial and spontaneous speech possible. All interviews were rigorously transcribed. One of the principal elements of this investigation's theoretical framework is narrative structure. Based on the model proposed by Labov, which has been applied extensively by linguists in analyses of bilingual speech communities in the United States, this study has identified each of the narratives interspersed in the general discourse and speech samples produced by the students. For the purpose of eliciting this type of speech data, the general framework of the interviews focused on past experiences and stories told by students in which they had actively participated, recalling memories of their childhood and academic experiences from the earliest educational stages to the present time as freshmen students in the University of Puerto Rico. Thus, the investigation has carefully examined the correlation between each of the linguistic features proposed and the six fundamental components of narrative structure: abstract, orientation, complicating actions, evaluation, resolution and coda.