Una aplicación del modelo del marco de la lengua matriz al habla de italianos de primera generación en México

Abstract

This paper describes an investigation in progress on the speech of first generation Italian inmigrants in Mexico City and focusses on how their native language is affected by the contact with the Spanish language. The anlysis of the production of code-switched utterances and of the various forms of modifications that appear in their speech is based on the Myers-Scotton and Jake’s “Matrix Language Frame Model” (1993) and (1995), and its extension, the “Matrix language turnover hypothesis”.
The results of the analysis reveal that the model can explain a number of codeswitching cases, but not all, and that the modifications of the first language might appear as a phase of attrition in the continuum from code-switching to shift and language loss, at least for some features.