The present investigation is a mixed-method study combining quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the use of como as a discourse marker in the Spanish spoken in Southern Arizona, based on a corpus of twenty-four sociolinguistic interviews of young male and female Spanish-English bilinguals. In the speech of these bilinguals, the discourse marker como mirrors the grammaticalization of the focus and quotative discourse functions of like in English. The results of this study on the diffusion of the focus and quotative como to another Spanish-English bilingual community add to our knowledge of how discourse markers can travel both within and between communities as well as across languages and time.

The present study analyzes the use of quotatives in Spanish among twenty-four Spanish-English bilinguals from Southern Arizona and assesses the possible influence of English contact in their use. Cameron (1998) defines the envelope of variation of quotatives in Spanish as verbs of direct report, bare-noun phrases, and null quotatives. This study identifies a fourth strategy of quotative discourse markers. A detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the linguistic conditioning of these four strategies of direct quotation according to content of the quote and grammatical person points to the fact that quotative discourse markers appear to be conditioned differently than the other three strategies, but contact with English does not play a decisive role in their use. These results contribute to our knowledge of Spanish in the United States and variation in quotative systems by expanding on Cameron’s (1998) study to explore the quotative system of the Spanish of the U.S. Southwest and adding an analysis of quotative discourse markers.

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This study analyzes the use of like in English and como, como que, and like in Spanish in the speech of bilinguals from Southern Arizona to assess the possible influence of like in English on its equivalents in Spanish in a language contact situation in which English is the majority language. Design/Methodology/Approach: Drawing on a discourse-pragmatic variationist approach, this study analyzes the use of like in English and its Spanish equivalents in recorded conversations between nine pairs of young Spanish-English bilingual friends from Southern Arizona. Data and Analysis: 3389 tokens of like in English and its Spanish equivalents from 18 hours of recorded conversations (9 hours in each language) were analyzed quantitatively. The analysis assesses the relative frequencies of these variants and their syntactic positioning as clause-external discourse markers and clause-internal discourse particles. The independent variables of the analysis were the language of the conversation and the sex and language dominance of the participants. Findings/Conclusions: Contact with English did not appear to radically influence the use of como, como que, and like in Spanish in the speech of these bilinguals. In the speech of the same bilinguals, like in English was much more frequent and occurred in many more syntactic positions than its Spanish equivalents. Originality: This is the first study of discourse-pragmatic features in contact to analyze the use of discourse markers and discourse particles in both the donor and the recipient language in the speech of the same bilinguals. Significance/Implications: These results contribute to our knowledge of the limited interaction of linguistic repertoires in the speech of bilinguals at the discourse level even in language contact situations with a majority language. They also underline the ability of bilinguals to both understand and reproduce the subtleties of the use of these features in the two languages they speak.

In this paper, we utilize negative polarity tag questions in order to assess to what extent discourse-pragmatic variables are susceptible to language contact induced changes. Based on a comparison of forms and functions of negative tags in the varieties spoken by Portuguese-Spanish bilinguals in a community on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border with the one spoken by monolinguals in the Uruguayan capital, we aimed at assessing to what extent any differences in this variable behavior may be affected by contact with Portuguese. Our results indicate that, despite the high permeability of discourse-pragmatic features in contact situations attested in the literature and the presumed tendency for cognate languages to converge, the forms and functions of negative tags in bilingual Spanish did not radically differ from the monolingual variety. We found, instead, an intricate pattern of convergences and divergences that challenges the presupposed assumptions about extreme permeability of cognate discourse pragmatic systems in contact.

This study analyzes the use of quotatives in recorded conversations in English and Spanish between nine pairs of young Spanish-English bilingual friends from Southern Arizona. A total of 1,304 tokens of quotatives from eighteen hours of recorded conversations (nine hours in each language) were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively according to content of the quote, tense, grammatical person, sex, and language dominance. The English quotative system of these young bilinguals was saturated with be like (78.68%, 620/788) while the preferred quotative in Spanish was decir (to say) (50%, 259/518), mirroring results of previous studies in both languages (Cameron, 1998; Holguín-Mendoza, 2015; Tagliamonte and D'Arcy, 2007). The remaining forms of quotatives in both languages were unpacked into eight distinct categories in English and ten different categories in Spanish. While both be like in English and decir 'to say' in Spanish favored introducing reported speech, the more innovative strategies of direct quotation in both languages appear to favor introducing internal monologue. Language contact in the speech of the bilingual participants does not radically influence the use of quotatives in both languages since only a few tokens of decir in English (0.38% 3/788) and be like in Spanish (5.21%, 27/518) were documented.