The current investigation addresses a vital lacuna in forensic author-ship studies, and more concretely, in Native Language Influence Detection (NLID)research: narrowing down a speaker’s native dialect instead of only their nativelanguage (L1), which might not be enough when carrying out sociolinguistic pro-filing tasks. Native Dialect Influence Detection (NDID), the focus of our study,can thus greatly aid at the investigative level. We approach this topic by pro-viding a comprehensive analysis of linguistic features that serve to identify twonon-contact dialects of L1 Spanish (i.e., Mexican and Peninsular varieties) whendealing with data written in L2 English, which come from Tripadvisor. Our mainaim is to investigate if an author’s L2 features can point to their L1 native di-alect, rather than only to their native language. Findings point to L1 dialectaltransfer of punctuation signs, adjectives of affect, and intensifiers: these linguisticfeatures, even when expressed in an L2, show a culturally bound use. Addition-ally, we implemented an automatic classifier that achieved an accuracy of 69% incategorizing test data, using only linguistic features that have explanatory powerand can aid linguistic theory. This is key for explainability in the forensic con-text, which Native Language Identification (NLI) studies tend to neglect (Kingston2019). Results show that L1 Spanish dialects can be differentiated by analyzing L2English text, pointing to NDID as a fertile approach for narrowing down candidateL1 dialects of a language when analyzing L2 data.

Regarding studies of Spanish in contact with Latin American indigenous languages, there has been little research on contact between Spanish and Purépecha, a language isolate from western Mexico. The present paper addresses this lacuna by examining number marking and number agreement in the Spanish production of five L1 adult Purépecha speakers, and it contributes to both the fields of second language studies and contact linguistics studies, by detecting specific structural and semantic conditions under which Purépecha morphosyntactic patterns are incorporated into Spanish: Results show non-standard number marking and lack of number agreement across the noun phrase, between the subject and the verb, and between the noun and its predicative adjective, possibly due to a shift dynamic (Thomason, 2001).

This study examines the diachronic change in argument structure in Spanish psych-verbs of ‘liking’, with emphasis on the change from nominative-experiencer gustar ‘to like’ to dative-experiencer gustar. While previous studies have looked at factors pertaining to frequency and semantics, this change must also be studied taking into account certain syntactic factors, and especially the evolution of prepositional finite clauses introduced by functional prepositions. Results suggest that the subcategorization properties of the preposition are grammatically relevant in determining the linguistic encoding of the arguments of Spanish ‘liking’ constructions. This study offers an extensive corpus study of ‘liking’ verbs, spanning the 13th to the 17th centuries, and adopts a constructionist usage-based view of syntactic productivity.