The expression of evidentiality in French-English bilingual
discourse, Language in Society, 1999, 23, 3. 355-365.
Ruth King & Terry Nadasdi
ABSTRACT. This study, drawing on data from a large sociolinguistic interview
corpus for three Atlantic Canada Acadian communities, concerns codeswitches
involving verbs of opinion or belief (e.g. guess, think, imagine, believe) in
French-English bilingual discourse. We find that the codeswitch itself serves
to underscore the speaker's stance as to the truth of the proposition and, in
some cases, to indicate a degree of uncertainty not nuanced by corresponding
French-language forms. Variation in usage is related to intensity of language
contact at the level of the community and at the level of the individual.