Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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Separate grids can be used for each of the bilingual’s four language skills (speaking, listening, writing, and reading) since it is often the case that amount of use and degree of proficiency can be quite different in these skills in the different languages. Thus, some bilinguals may have very good oral comprehension of a language but may not speak it very well; others may know how to read and write one of their languages but not the other(s), and so on. A few years after the grid approach was proposed, two other researchers, Luk and Bialystok (2013), provided statistical evidence that bilingual experience does indeed involve at least two dimensions, language use (they call it bilingual usage) and language proficiency, and that these dimensions are not mutually exclusive. These variables are the first building blocks of the description of the bilingual to which others need to be added, as we will now see.

If one is interested in a bilingual’s language use, one will invariably be confronted with the functions of the person’s languages, that is which language is used, when, for what and with whom. More than half a century ago, Weinreich (1953) had already stated that many bilinguals are accustomed to discuss some topics in only one of their languages. Several years later, Mackey (1962) divided language functions into external functions (language use in various situations and domains) and internal functions (the non‐communicative uses of language such as counting, praying, dreaming, etc.). Clearly not all facets of life in bilinguals require the same language, nor do they demand both languages. Based on this, Grosjean (1997, 2016 ) proposed the Complementarity Principle, which he defined as follows: