(DOWNLOAD) "Spanish Influenced by English in Georgia: Intra-Speaker Variation." by Southwest Journal of Linguistics # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Spanish Influenced by English in Georgia: Intra-Speaker Variation.
- Author : Southwest Journal of Linguistics
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 232 KB
Description
ABSTRACT. In a Georgia (U.S.A.) community, Latin American immigrants' Spanish/English bilingual patterns include monolingual Spanish and English turns, codeswitched turns, and turns showing grammatical convergence. The data are analyzed within Myers-Scotton's (1993 [1997], 2002) Matrix Language Frame model. This paper focuses on the convergence data, especially the data of two Peruvian boys in the community. In line with English morphosyntactic structure, verbs in Spanish sometimes lose their finite forms, with subject pronouns providing the needed information, definite articles lose gender/number distinction, and Spanish word order conforms to English word order. Spanish utterances unaffected by English are more frequent, however, than utterances affected grammatically by English, even for the two Peruvian boys, the speakers who converge most frequently. There is, therefore, competing intra-speaker variation between LI word strings with standard L1 grammatical patterns and L1 word strings with L2-influenced grammatical patterns. These findings imply the need for future studies to explore factors other than lack of access to target L1 models to explain the convergence. INTRODUCTION. When two language groups live, work, and attend schools in the same community, processes of language change are almost inevitable. This study reports on how Spanish is influenced by contact with English in a recently established Hispanic speech community in Northeast Georgia. This community began to emerge in the 1980s in Habersham County, Georgia, and parts of two bordering counties, Banks and Stephens.