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Language Variation - European Perspectives VII: Selected papers from the Ninth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9), Malaga, June 2017
Edited by Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda, Francisco Díaz Montesinos, Antonio Manuel Ávila-Muñoz and Matilde Vida-Castro
[Studies in Language Variation 22] 2019
► pp. 217–230

Chapter 14
Complementing in another language

Prosody and code-switching

| Pennsylvania State University
| Pennsylvania State University

In English-Spanish code-switching, the main and complement clause boundary is a site of variable equivalence between languages. Whereas the complementiser is always present in Spanish, in English it is only sometimes present, giving rise to a quantitative word string mismatch at this juncture. Comparisons with monolingual benchmarks reveal no grammatical convergence of the contact varieties in finite complementation patterns. Rather, prosody provides a solution to variable equivalence. Whereas main and complement clauses tend to be prosodically integrated by occurring in the same Intonation Unit in unilingual speech, the opposite is true when there is code-switching at the clause boundary. Prosodic distancing of the two languages at junctures of variable equivalence is thus a bilingual strategy for code-switching between separate grammars.

Keywords: prosody, complementation, code-switching, equivalence, convergence, bilingualism, English, Spanish, New Mexico, Intonation Unit
Article outline
  • 1.Code-switching and equivalence
  • 2.A community-based bilingual speech corpus
  • 3.Prosodic and syntactic relationships
  • 4.Variable equivalence and English-Spanish complementation
  • 5.Code-switching through prosodic distancing of the boundary between main and complement clause
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.22.14ste
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Beatty-Martínez, Anne L., Christian A. Navarro-Torres & Paola E. Dussias
2020. Codeswitching: A Bilingual Toolkit for Opportunistic Speech Planning. Frontiers in Psychology 11 DOI logo
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, Nathalie Dion, Dora LaCasse & Shana Poplack
2022. How to mix. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 12:5 ► pp. 628 ff. DOI logo

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