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The emergent grammar of bilinguals: The Spanish verb hacer ‘do’ with a bare English infinitive

2014; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 19; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1367006913516047

1756-6878

Damián Vergara Wilson, Jenny Dumont,

Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

This study examines the bilingual compound verb hacer ‘to do’+Verb Eng , consisting of the Spanish verb hacer ‘do’ and a bare English infinitive (e.g. hacer smoke ‘to smoke’). In studies of Spanish/English bilingual speech, hacer+Verb Eng has received attention due to its linguistically hybrid nature. Examining 116 tokens of hacer+Verb Eng from 12 speakers of the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual Corpus, we test the claim that this construction has developed out of a higher cognitive load or lexical gap experienced by bilingual speakers, create a discourse profile of the construction, and propose an overview of the bilingual behaviors that contribute to the emergence of this bilingual compound verb. The construction is not found in conjunction with significantly higher rates of disfluencies, which weakens the previously made assertions that it is produced to compensate for a lexical gap. We find that hacer+Verb Eng is a productive bilingual construction in which hacer serves as a tense, aspect and mood marker and the English infinitive provides the lexical content. Linguistic behavioral profiles reveal that combining languages within a single prosodic unit is correlated with higher rates of hacer+Verb Eng .