This study examines the bilingual compound verb hacer 'to do'+Verb Eng , consisting of the Spanish verb hacer 'do' and a bare English infinitive (e.g. hacer smoke 'to smoke'). In studies of Spanish/ English bilingual speech, hacer+Verb Eng has received attention due to its linguistically hybrid nature. Examining 116 tokens of hacer+Verb Eng from 12 speakers of the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual Corpus, we test the claim that this construction has developed out of a higher cognitive load or lexical gap experienced by bilingual speakers, create a discourse profile of the construction, and propose an overview of the bilingual behaviors that contribute to the emergence of this bilingual compound verb. The construction is not found in conjunction with significantly higher rates of disfluencies, which weakens the previously made assertions that it is produced to compensate for a lexical gap. We find that hacer+Verb Eng is a productive bilingual construction in which hacer serves as a tense, aspect and mood marker and the English infinitive provides the lexical content. Linguistic behavioral profiles reveal that combining languages within a single prosodic unit is correlated with higher rates of hacer+Verb Eng .

This volume, a case study on the grammar of third person references in two genres of spoken Ecuadorian Spanish, examines from a discourse-analytic perspective how genre affects linguistic patterns and how researchers can look for and interpret genre effects. This marks a timely contribution to corpus linguistics, as many linguists are choosing to work with empirical data. Corpus based approaches have many advantages and are useful in the comparison of different languages as well as varieties of the same language, but what is often overlooked in such comparisons is the genre of language under examination. As this case study shows, genre is an important factor in interpreting patterns and distributions of forms. The book also contributes toward theories of anaphora, referentiality and Preferred Argument Structure. It is relevant for scholars who work with referentiality, genre differences, third person references, and interactional linguistics, as well as those interested in Spanish morphosyntax.

It has been assumed that bilingual speakers have a heavier cognitive load than monolinguals, which may be responsible for language change such as simplification, overgeneralization, transfer and code-switching. While the cognitive load hypothesis is interesting, the hypothesis has not been empirically tested using naturally occurring speech. Using data from a Spanish/English bilingual community, this study operationalizes and tests the cognitive load hypothesis by studying disfluencies in two groups of Spanish speakers with varying degrees of English proficiency. Specifically, truncated utterances and the mechanisms of linguistic repair involved in fixing these disfluencies are examined. The results show measurable differences between the two groups. The group of speakers with higher bilingual proficiency, who are predicted to have a heavier cognitive load, shows a significantly higher rate of repair; additionally the syntactic patterns and types of repair are significantly different between the more bilingual and the less bilingual speakers, suggesting that they use repair in divergent ways. There is not sufficient evidence, however, to conclude that the more bilingual speakers have a higher cognitive load.

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