Like in English and como, como que, and like in Spanish in the speech of Southern Arizona bilinguals

Abstract

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.

A syntactic approach to gender assignment in Spanish–English bilingual speech

“…assignment in the speech of a Spanish-English bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S., only 60 miles away from the U.S.-Mexico border. The corpus I analyze here is of particular interest because it comes with rich information about participants' bilingual experience.Moreover, all the participants of this bilingual corpus live and work in a bilingual community that is well documented to engage in codeswitching practices(DuBord 2004;Casillas 2013;Cruz 2016;Bessett 2017;Kern 2019). …”

Linguistic factors modulating gender assignment in Spanish–English bilingual speech

“…Gender assignment in the spontaneous codeswitched speech of a Spanish-English bilingual community from Southern Arizona, U.S. is particularly relevant for the purpose of the present study. Spanish is in consistent contact with English in Southern Arizona, and Spanish-English bilinguals who live and work in this geographical region are well-documented to engage in codeswitching practices on a daily basis (Besset, 2017;Casillas, 2013;Cruz, 2016Cruz, , 2018DuBord, 2004;Kern, 2019). A large sample of Spanish-English bilingual speakers from this well-defined codeswitching community is documented in the CESA Corpus (Carvalho, 2012).…”

“…All participants were recruited in Tucson, Arizona, U.S. This particular geographical region of the U.S. was chosen because Spanish-English bilinguals who live and work in Southern Arizona, including Tucson, are well-known to engage in habitual codeswitching practices (Besset, 2017;Casillas, 2013;Cruz, 2016Cruz, , 2018DuBord, 2004;Kern, 2019).…”

“…Spanish-English bilingual speakers who live and work in Southern Arizona, U.S. are well-known to engage in habitual codeswitching practices (Besset, 2017;Casillas, 2013;Cruz, 2016Cruz, , 2018DuBord, 2004;Kern, 2019). Drawing on naturally-occurring bilingual speech from this well-defined codeswitching community in Southern Arizona, in the present experimental study I examine the linguistic information that Spanish-English bilinguals who live and work in this bilingual community may deploy when asked to assign Spanish gender to English nouns in experimentally elicited responses to Spanish det-English noun switches (e.g., el/la key 'the.M/F') and English-Spanish switched copula constructions (e.g., The key está rot-o/a 'is broken-M/F').…”

Grammatical Positions of Focuser Like Among Native English-Speaking Undergraduate Students

“…Similarly, D"Arcy (2017) did not find a proportional difference in the use of like as a focus discourse function in terms of gender. However, she argued that men used like more as discourse particle, while women employed like as a discourse marker (Kern, 2020).…”