A Study of Conjunctions and Codeswitching among some Ewe-English Bilinguals

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the Ewe language realizes cohesion by means of conjunctions in comparison with English as well as the similarities and differences in the way the two languages realize cohesion in this regard. The findings revealed that both English and Ewe realize cohesion by conjunction almost the same way. The only major difference is that conjunctions in Ewe turn to be phrasal rather than single lexical items. Moreover, the study revealed that conjunction choice in Ewe-English bilingual constructions (codeswitching) does not depend on the matrix language (Ewe) of the bilingual. Constraints such as preference for simplicity, speech speed and uniformity are responsible for conjunction choice. These findings show that the matrix language model has limitations and that the second languages of bilinguals are capable of informing the choice of some grammatical items in bilingual constructions (codeswitching).