LANGUAGE SWITCHES IN L3 PRODUCTION - IMPLICATIONS FOR A POLYGLOT SPEAKING MODEL

In general, discussion of cross-linguistic influence has focussed almo st exclusively on the role of L1 in L2 production, both in the form of crosslinguistic influence on the learner's interlanguage and in the f orm of language switches to the L1 during L2 production. As yet, there has been little work done on the influence of a learner's other previ ously learned L2s in the acquisition of a new language (L3). The few s tudies that have been been carried out on the role of L2 in L3 product ion however show that L2 does play an important role in L3 acquisition . This paper presents the results of ongoing research on nonadapted la nguage switches, using data from a two-year longitudinal case study of an adult learner of L3 Swedish with L1 English and L2 German. Our stu dy is based on 844 non-adapted language switches. We identified four m ain types of switch, three of which had pragmatic purpose, namely: (i) EDIT (marking self-repair, beginning of turntake etc.), (ii) META (us ed for asides, to comment on L3 performance or ask for help) and (iii) INSERT (use Of non-L3 items to overcome lexical problems in L3), and the last of which we refer to as Without Identified Pragmatic Purpose (WIPP switch; cf 'non-intentional switches', Poulisse and Bongaerts 19 94). We found that while L1 English prevailed in EDIT, META and INSERT functions, almost only L2 German occurred in WIPP switches. Most Of t hese WIPP switches were function words. We also noticed that a number of the English utterances used in INSERT function appeared to show Ger man influence, although this was not the case when English was used in META function. Our results show that in this case study of L3 acquisi tion, L1 and L2 play different roles. We suggest that L2 German, which was shown to be the non-L3 language predominantly used to supply mate rial for lexical construction attempts in the L3 (Williams and Hammarb erg 1994), is activated in parallel to the L3 interlanguage, underlyin g L3 production and even L1 production. We refer to this as the DEFAUL T SUPPLIER role. L1 English, on the other hand, is more seldom used in lexical construction attempts in the L3 or activated in parallel but rather is kept separate from the L3 and used largely with a metalingui stic function. We refer to this as the INSTRUMENTAL role. We propose a developmental model of L3 production based on de Bet's (1992) model o f bilingual speech production but involving role assignment to the bac kground languages, such that only the language which has been assigned the role of DEFAULT SUPPLIER is regularly activated in parallel to th e L3 interlanguage. Over time, these two roles are largely taken over by the L3 itself. We suggest that these roles also exist in L2 acquisi tion but since there is only one background language, this takes over both roles and overt distinctions between them collapse.