Repetition as linguistic and social strategy in Hindi-English bilingual discourse

This dissertation considers repetition phenomena in Hindi-English bilingual discourse. Through analysis of everyday Hindi-English conversations, I demonstrate that code-switching and related bilingual phenomena systematically expand options bilingual speakers have for structuring discourse, managing interactions, and making linguistic and social meaning. The systematicity and strategy of Hindi-English code-switching are particularly apparent in what I term bilingual repetition. In bilingual repetition, the semantic content of an utterance in one language is repeated in another language, usually in close proximity to the first occurrence. Bilingual repetition is encountered throughout South Asian multilingual contexts ranging from casual conversations to printed advertisements to Bollywood dialogues. I also consider repetition as a discourse-level areal feature of South Asia. Both monolingual and bilingual repetition phenomena offer an opportunity to investigate alternatives for making meaning both within and across languages due to the side-by-side presentation of semantically and formally related messages. Ultimately, code-switching and repetition in Hindi-English bilingual discourse emerge as practices that both create and reflect linguistic and social simultaneity.