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Abstract

The aim of this article is to focus on the two salient aspects of the capacity of the bilingual mind/brain, namely, its ability to maintain both language separation on one hand and language integration on the other. These two types of bilingual capacity result in language mixing, termed Code Mixing (CM) and Code Switching (CS) in socio-linguistic research. The article reveals various facets of bilingual creativity through language mixing as it manifests itself in the day-to-day verbal behaviour of a bilingual and in global advertising. The article argues that language mixing is essentially an ‘optimizing’ strategy which renders a wide variety of new meaning which the separate linguistic systems are incapable of rendering by themselves.

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The Bilingual Mind and Linguistic Creativity

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