Language contact and linguistic change are thought to go hand in hand (e.g. Silva-Corvalán 1994), however there are methodological obstacles, such as collecting data at different points in time or the availability of monolingual data for comparison, that make claims about language change tenuous. The present study draws on two different corpora of spoken Spanish — bilingual New Mexican Spanish and monolingual Ecuadorian Spanish — in order to quantitatively assess the convergence hypothesis in which contact with English has produced a change to the Spanish verbal system, as reflected in an extension of the Present and Past Progressive forms at the expense of the synthetic Simple Present and Imperfect forms. The data do not show that the Spanish spoken by the bilinguals is changing to more closely resemble the analogous English progressive constructions, but instead suggest potential weakening of linguistic constraints on the conditioning of the variation between periphrastic and synthetic forms.
Forthcoming. “Structural Autonomy and Aspectual Import: A New Spanish Progressive.” Probus.
Bills, Garland, and Neddy Vigil
2008The Spanish Language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A Linguistic Atlas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca
1994The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Cortés-Torres, Mayra
2005 “¿Qué estás haciendo?: La variación de la perífrasis estar + - ndo en el español puertorriqueño.” In Selected Proceedings of the 7th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, ed. by David Eddington, 42–55. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Dumont, Jenny
2011NPs in Conversations and Narratives: The Effects of Genre, Information Flow and Interaction. Ph.D. Diss., University of New Mexico.
Dumont, Jenny
2013 “Another Look at the Present Perfect in an Andean Variety of Spanish: Grammaticalization and Evidentiality in Quiteño Spanish.” In Selected Proceedings of the 16th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, ed. Jennifer Cabrelli Amaro, et al., 279–291. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Eckert, Penelope
1989 “The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in Variation.” Language Variation and Change 1 (3): 245–267.
1999 “Crossing Social and Cultural Borders: The Road to Language Hybridity.” In Speaking Chicana, ed. by Leticia Galindo and María Dolores Gonzales, 13–38. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Gutiérrez, Manuel J
1989Michoacan Spanish/Los Angeles Spanish: Trends in a Process of Linguistic Change. Ph.D. Diss., Univ. of Southern California.
Gumperz, John, and Robert Wilson
1971 “Convergence and Creolization: A Case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian Border in India.” In Pidginization and creolization of languages, ed. by Dell Hymes, 151–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gutiérrez, Manuel J
2003 “Simplification and Innovation in US Spanish.” Multilingua 221: 169–184.
Haboud, Marleen
1998Quichua y castellano en los Andes ecuatorianos: Los efectos de un contacto prolongado. Quito: Abya-Yala.
Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva
2005Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Daniel Ezra
2009 “Getting off the GoldVarb Standard: Introducing Rbrul for Mixed-Effects Variable Rule Analysis.” Language and Linguistics Compass 3 (1): 359–383.
Klein, Flora
1980 “A Quantitative Study of Syntactic and Pragmatic Indications of Change in the Spanish of Bilinguals in the U.S.” In Locating Language in Time and Space, ed. by William Labov, 69–82. New York: Academic Press.
Labov, William
1984 “Field Methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation.” In Language in Use: Readings in Sociolinguistics, ed. by John Baugh and Joel Sherzer, 28–53. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Labov, William
2001Principles of Linguistic Change, vol. 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lavandera, Beatriz
1981 “Lo Quebramos, but only in Performance.” In Latino Language and Communicative Behavior, ed. by Richard P. Durán, 49–67. Norwood: Ablex.
Lope Blanch, J.M
(ed.) (1971) El habla de la ciudad de México. Materiales para su estudio. México: UNAM/Centro de Lingüística Hispánica.
Poplack, Shana, and Stephen Levey
2010 “Contact-induced Grammatical Change.” In Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation, Volume 1:Theories and Methods, ed. by Peter Auer and Jürgen Erich Schmidt, 391–419. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Poplack, Shana, Lauren Zentz, and Nathalie Dion
2012 “What Counts as (contact-induced) Change.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 151: 247–254.
Reig Alamillo, Asela
2009 “Cross-dialectal Variation in Propositional Anaphora: Null Objects and Propositional lo in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish.” Language Variation and Change 21 (3): 381–412.
Rissel, Dorothy A
1989 “Sex, Attitudes, and the Assibilation of /r/ among Young People in San Luis Potosí, Mexico.” Language Variation and Change 1 (3): 269–283.
Schwenter, Scott
2011 “Variationist Approaches to Spanish Morphosyntax.” In The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistic, ed. by Manel Diaz-Campos, 123–147. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Shin, Naomi Lapidus
2013 “Women as Leaders of Language Change: A Qualification from the Bilingual Perspective.” In Selected Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, ed. by Ana M. Carvalho and Sara Beaudrie, 135–147. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Silva-Corvalan, Carmen
1986 “Bilingualism and Language Change: The Extension of Estar in Los Angeles Spanish.” Language 621: 587–608.
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen
1994Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen
2001Sociolingüística y Pragmática del Español, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
Thomason, Sarah Grey, and Terrence Kaufman
1988Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena
1998 “Funciones del imperfecto progresivo en el español nuevomexicano.” In IV Encuentro internacional de lingüística en el noroeste. Tomo II: Estudios del español, ed. by Andrés Acosta Félix, Zarina Estrada Fernández, Max Figueroa Esteva, and Gerardo López Cruz, 161–183. Hermosillo, Sonora: Editorial UniSon.
2015 “Gauging Convergence on the Ground: Code- switching in the Community.” International Journal of Bilingualism,
Special issue
, ed. by C.E. Travis and R. Torres Cacoullos, 19 (4): 365–386.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, and Catherine E. Travis
In preparation. “New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual (NMSEB) corpus.” National Science Foundation 1019112/1019122. [URL]
Travis, Catherine E., and Rena Torres Cacoullos
2013 “Making Voices Count: Corpus Compilation in Bilingual Communities.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 33 (2): 170–194.
Wilson, Damian V
2013 “One Construction, Two Source Languages: Hacer with an English Infinitive in Bilingual Discourse.” In Proceedings from the 6th International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, ed. by Ana Carvalho and Sara Beadrie, 123–134. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Wilson, Damián Vergara, and Jenny Dumont
2015 “The Emergent Grammar of Bilinguals: The Spanish verb hacer “do” with a bare English Infinitive.” International Journal of Bilingualism,
Special issue, ed. by C.E. Travis and R. Torres Cacoullos, 19 (4): 444–458.
Vendler, Zeno
1957 “Verbs and Times.” The Philosophical Review 66 (2): 143–160.
Cited by (7)
Cited by 7 other publications
Perevozchikova, Tatiana
2023. Possessive pronouns in Russian-German language contact: variation or change?. Linguistics Vanguard 9:s2 ► pp. 169 ff.
Balam, Osmer , María del Carmen Parafita Couto & Mia Amanda Chen
2021. Being in bilingual speech. Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 3:2
Cacoullos, Rena Torres & Catherine E. Travis
2021. Alternating or Mixing Languages?. In English and Spanish, ► pp. 287 ff.
Danae Perez, Marianne Hundt, Johannes Kabatek & Daniel Schreier
2019. Review: Torres Cacoullos and Travis. 2018. Bilingualism in the Community: Code-switching and Grammars in Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corpora 14:2 ► pp. 265 ff.
Bayley, Robert
2017. Presidential Address: Dialectology in a Multilingual America. American Speech 92:1 ► pp. 6 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.