Cuando baja el sol A variationist analysis of subject position in bilingual Arizonan and monolingual Mexican Spanish

• Published in: Spanish in context Vol. 21; no. 3; pp. 537 - 562
• Main Authors: McKinnon, Sean, Jung, Daniel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam John Benjamins Publishing Company 31.12.2024
• Subjects: Bilingualism; Language change; Language contact; Monolingualism; Morphosyntax; Sentence structure; Sociolinguistics; Spanish language; Word order
• ISSN: 1571-0718; 1571-0726
• DOI: 10.1075/sic.22018.mck

Although the US Southwest region has a long history of language contact between English and Spanish, the literature has provided mixed evidence for contact-induced language changes. The present study adds to this body of work with a variationist analysis of subject position with intransitive constructions in bilingual Arizonan Spanish and monolingual Mexican Spanish. Overall, our findings demonstrate that both varieties are influenced by the same linguistic factors with the same directionality of effects. However, the overall rate of post-verbal subjects is lower in bilingual Arizonan Spanish vis-à-vis monolingual Mexican Spanish within almost every linguistic factor, which suggests frequential copying from English’s less flexible word order. Additionally, there were differences between sociolinguistic generations, first generation bilingual and monolingual speakers, and the constraint hierarchies of each variety. Altogether, these findings provide preliminary evidence for language contact, and we outline future avenues to test for contact-induced change with this morphosyntactic variable.