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Recent Developments in Hispanic Linguistics: Studies in structure, variation, and bilingualism
Edited by Michael Gradoville and Sean McKinnon
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 41] 2024
► pp. 151–171

Chapter 6
The present progressive as a future marker in Spanish, English, and Spanish in contact with English

ORCID logo | North Carolina State University
| University at Albany, SUNY
We examined the acceptance of the present progressive (e.g., I am traveling) with future meaning (PPF) by 82 monolingual English, monolingual Spanish, and heritage Spanish speakers. Participants evaluated on a scale of 1–5 the acceptability of the PPF in 20 contexts that were embedded in a narrative in which we manipulated the surrounding discourse for temporal reference, event certainty, and presence of a locative marker. Results indicate that heritage Spanish speakers evaluated the PPF differently in English and Spanish, and differently from both monolingual groups. These findings indicate that the effects of language contact in U.S. Spanish-English bilinguals is bidirectional and that heritage Spanish speakers maintain two distinct systems for the PPF in Spanish and English.
Keywords: bilingualism, language contact, future, variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The present progressive as a future form in English
    • 2.2The present progressive as a future form in Spanish
    • 2.3The effects of language contact and bilingualism
    • 2.4The current study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Tasks
      • 3.2.1Written contextualized task
      • 3.2.2Bilingual language profile
      • 3.2.3Vocabulary
      • 3.2.4Background questionnaire
    • 3.3Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.41.06zah
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