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This doctoral thesis focuses on Russian-English bilingualism and code-switching in New York and is based on a field-study Esma Gregor conducted between 1998 and 2000 in New York City. Consisting of several parts, the thesis begins with a discussion of the methodological framework used by the author and subsequent problems encountered during the field-study. Subsequent parts focus on Russian immigration to New York City and details the current linguistic situation of the Russian-speaking minority in New York. The greater part of the thesis, however, focuses on a discussion on the main functional models in code-switching research, and applies them to the data gathered in the field-study. In a subsequent analysis of the field-work, the results are quantified and an attempt is made to correlate the linguistic competence of the speakers with their code-switching behavior.
List of contents
Contents: The Field-Work, the Speakers, and the Data - Russians in New York City - Sociolinguistic Background - Russian Bilingualism and Bilinguality - The Search for the Function of Code-choice in Discourse - Analysis and Quantification.
About the author
The Author: Esma Gregor, born in Berlin, Germany on October 11, 1969, took courses in English, American and Hispanic studies at Humboldt-University, Berlin, receiving an M.A. in 1996. A bilingual herself, the author selected the Russian-English bilingualism of New York City as the topic of her Ph.D. Starting in 1998, she spent a year as a guest student at the New York University linguistics department, and commenced her field-study for what became the basis for her doctoral thesis. Esma Gregor currently lives in New York.
