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Bilingualism and representation: Locating Spanish-English contact in legal institutional memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2006

SHONNA L. TRINCH
SHONNA L. TRINCH
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, 899 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10019 [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines how the official legal record, presumably an institutional space consisting of Standard American English (SAE), can become a record of a regional variety of English. Utilizing theory from language contact situations, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis, it describes and explains how a prestigious societal institution, often analyzed as imposing its powerful voice on those less powerful, exhibits some permeability as it absorbs at least a few discursive representations of a less dominant bilingual and bicultural group. Traces of the Spanish-English contact situation, biculturalism, and Latino life find their way into the official discursive space via stereotype, topic, lexical items, prepositions, and some verbal constructions. The discussion covers why some legal arenas are more impervious to linguistic and cultural diversity (or “accented English”) than are others. The conclusion discusses what such representations might mean for Latina women.The National Science Foundation's Law and Social Science Program (SBR#-9709938) and the Social Science Research Council's Sexuality Research Fellowship Program provided funding for data collection for this study. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Barbara Johnstone for their comments and critiques on earlier versions of this article. While any remaining errors or oversights are mine alone, the reviewers' and editor's linguistic knowledge and insight have helped to make the work stronger and clearer. Also, I am grateful to Florida State University's Winthrop-King Foundation for paying Ms. Shelley Bayless to help me codify and count data. And finally, I must thank my mother, Angela M. Trinch, for being there when both of my children were born so that I could work on this article.

Keywords

standard EnglishLatino Englishofficial recordprepositionslanguage contactlegal system
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , October 2006 , pp. 559 - 593
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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