Book contents
- English and Spanish
- English and Spanish
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction: English and Spanish in Contact – World Languages in Interaction
- 2 The Emergence of Global Languages
- 3 Some (Unintended) Consequences of Colonization
- 4 Dialect Contact and the Emergence of New Varieties of English
- 5 The Emergence of Latin American Spanish
- 6 Creole Distinctiveness?
- 7 Contact Scenarios and Varieties of Spanish beyond Europe
- 8 Pluricentricity and Codification in World English
- 9 Spanish Today
- 10 Uncovering the Big Picture
- 11 Morphosyntactic Variation in Spanish
- 12 English and Spanish in Contact in North America
- 13 ‘The Spanish of the Internet’: Is That a Thing?
- 14 Alternating or Mixing Languages?
- 15 The Persistence of Dialectal Differences in U.S. Spanish
- 16 Identity Construction
- Index
- References
14 - Alternating or Mixing Languages?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2021
Book contents
- English and Spanish
- English and Spanish
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction: English and Spanish in Contact – World Languages in Interaction
- 2 The Emergence of Global Languages
- 3 Some (Unintended) Consequences of Colonization
- 4 Dialect Contact and the Emergence of New Varieties of English
- 5 The Emergence of Latin American Spanish
- 6 Creole Distinctiveness?
- 7 Contact Scenarios and Varieties of Spanish beyond Europe
- 8 Pluricentricity and Codification in World English
- 9 Spanish Today
- 10 Uncovering the Big Picture
- 11 Morphosyntactic Variation in Spanish
- 12 English and Spanish in Contact in North America
- 13 ‘The Spanish of the Internet’: Is That a Thing?
- 14 Alternating or Mixing Languages?
- 15 The Persistence of Dialectal Differences in U.S. Spanish
- 16 Identity Construction
- Index
- References
Summary
Does bilingualism bring about structural similarity between the languages in contact? The convergence evaluation metric illustrated in this chapter relies on appropriate data – speech corpora from a well-established bilingual community and from monolingual benchmarks – and a replicable method – diagnostic differences between languages pivoted on the probabilistic structure of internal variation. For variable subject expression, one diagnostic difference lies in prosodic position: the variable context for null subjects in English, outside coordinate clauses, is restricted to verb-initial prosodic units, which, conversely favor pronominal subjects in Spanish. A second quantitative measure is found in accessibility: the effect of coreferentiality and clause linking with the preceding subject is stronger in English than in Spanish. On both measures, bilinguals’ English and Spanish line up with their respective monolingual counterparts and, most remarkably, are different from each other, refuting morphosyntactic convergence. When both languages are in regular use, bilingualism is compatible with continuity rather than change, being best characterized as alternation between, not mixing of, languages.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- English and SpanishWorld Languages in Interaction, pp. 287 - 311Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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