The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, adopting a variationist approach, it examines the relative frequency of the present perfect and preterite alternation and the particular conditioning factors that might favor the use of the PP in Southern Arizona Spanish; secondly, it attempts to situate the use of Southern Arizona PP in the scope of the typology of periphrastic pasts proposed in Harris (1982). A multivariate analysis reveals that frequency and approximate adverbs, stative predicates, and indeterminate reference favor the PP in this variety, meaning that the PP shows characteristics of a continuative perfect. This in turn suggests that the PP in this variety situates at stage II in Harris’s developmental stages.

This paper examines clitic climbing in contexts featuring Spanish parecer ‘seem’, a verb that has been claimed to lack restructuring altogether in Spanish (Gallego, 2009; Torrego, 1996; Zagona, 1982). The paper identifies several contexts favoring clitic climbing with parecer. In particular, 3rd person clitic climbing is favored with psychological predicates and functional elements such as negation, temporal priority adverbs, and left dislocated elements. It is argued that Spanish parecer is a bona fide example of restructuring (R-parecer). This paper offers an account of R-parecer in terms of Cinque’s (2004, 2006) approach to restructuring. Moreover, this paper also investigates whether R-parecer is subject to Cinque’s (2004, 2006) rigidly ordered functional hierarchy of the clause. It is shown that Spanish parecer and French sembler ‘seem’ deviate from Cinque’s functional hierarchy. The paper concludes that we must leave open the possibility that lexical verbs may also give rise to restructuring in Romance.

Drawing on naturally-occurring bilingual speech from a well-defined codeswitching community in Southern Arizona, this study examined the influence of semantic gender (a.k.a. biological gender), analogical gender, and other-language phonemic cues in modulating gender assignment in Spanish–English codeswitched speech. Thirty-four Spanish–English early bilinguals completed a forced-choice elicitation task involving two codeswitching environments: Spanish determiner–English noun switches (Task 1) and English–Spanish switched copula constructions (Task 2). The results revealed that for human-denoting nouns, bilinguals assigned grammatical gender based on the presupposed sex of a noun's referent in both syntactic environments tested. As for inanimate nouns, bilinguals were more likely to assign masculine over feminine gender to such nouns in determiner–noun switches, but not in switched copula constructions. Other-language phonemic cues did not influence the assignment mechanism. A methodological implication is that the study replicated the codeswitching patterns observed in naturally-occurring bilingual speech from the same bilingual community.