Professor Margaret Deuchar

My research interests are in bilingualism, particularly code-switching and I recently organised an interdisciplinary workshop on code-switching, held in Cambridge on 3-4th October 2016.  This led to the establishment of a code-switching reading group which met regularly in the year 2016-2017 and will continue in 2017-2018.  I have recently completed a book about Welsh-English code-switching to be published by John Benjamins. With a research team at Bangor University we collected bilingual conversations from three groups of bilinguals: Welsh-English, Spanish-English and Welsh-Spanish.  The conversations were transcribed and are made available in the public domain (www.bangortalk.org.uk).  Data from the corpora have been used by my collaborators and myself to evaluate competing linguistic theories of code-switching (e.g. Herring et al 2010), to compare code-switching patterns in three bilingual communities (Carter et al 2011), challenge influential views of the boundary between code-switching and borrowing (Stammers & Deuchar 2012) and to establish the key extralinguistic factors influencing the production of code-switching (Deuchar et al forthcoming).  Current work focuses on the choice of the matrix language in Spanish-English code-switching and how this is related to the structure of mixed nominal constructions.