Social meaning behind Catalan-Spanish code-mixing/code-switching in the Catalan television series Merlí

Abstract

This paper briefly analyzes the discourse of several fictional characters portrayed in Merlí i els peripatètics (lit. ‘Merlí and the Peripatetics’), a Catalan TV series. It discusses the characters’ speech acts and the social meaning behind code-mixing/code-switching incidents, providing a sample of translingual markers and contextualization cues as social meaning constructors by which fictional characters’ linguistic identities can be portrayed. The corpus introduced in this paper, including dialogues with both Spanish and Catalan utterances, was prepared by viewing all the episodes of this series, comprising three seasons. Characters’ names, together with a brief description of the scenes, are provided to contextualize the characters and their linguistic background.

Keywords: social meaning, code-mixing, code-switching, markers, fiction language.