Chapter published in:
Hispanic Contact Linguistics: Theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives
Edited by Luis A. Ortiz López, Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo and Melvin González-Rivera
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 22] 2020
► pp. 236–259

Chapter 10. Portuguese-Spanish contacts in Misiones, Argentina

Probing (for) code-switching constraints

| The Pennsylvania State University

The present study reports on spontaneous Portuguese-Spanish mixing as produced by L2 and balanced bilinguals in various communities along the Brazilian border, as well as three interactive tasks conducted with fluent bilinguals in Misiones province, Argentina. Taken together the results reveal a residue of permeable but grammatically-grounded constraints even between morphosyntactically and lexically cognate sibling languages and among individuals who do not routinely code-switch. These constraints are more robustly maintained among fluent bilinguals but are sometimes contravened by L2 speakers. The data also demonstrate that code-switching does not emerge automatically in bilingual settings involving highly congruent languages.

Keywords: Portuguese, codeswitching constraints, Spanish, language processing, bilingualism
Published online: 14 February 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.22.10lip
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