How to make sense of codes in plurilingual settings multiple choices or rational decision making

Abstract

This work tries to give an overview of one of the most influential studies which has developed the most controversial debates in the fields of language contact and plurilingualism, namely the makdeness model and its extended form the rational choice model. These approaches discussed in this work, we believe, offer a comprehensive treatment of CS from a socio-psychological point of view. Our prime objective is to explain the different manifestations of two typologically different codes; Algerian Arabic and French and their implications in shaping the syntactic/pragmatic structures in mixed codes. The analysis of our AA/Fr CS and MSA/AA code-switched data is based on some observations elicited from the speech of Algerian bilingual speakers at university.