This thesis focuses on gender-assignment strategies in Spanish-English mixed nominal constructions in which nouns come from English and determiners come from Spanish. Spanish has gender-agreement...Show moreThis thesis focuses on gender-assignment strategies in Spanish-English mixed nominal constructions in which nouns come from English and determiners come from Spanish. Spanish has gender-agreement for determiners (el/los/uno/estos for masculine, la/las/una/estas for feminine gender), as well as also other types of agreement, for instance with adjectives. English does not possess gender-agreement in the least. This conflict site where grammars of the two languages have conflicting rules, is therefore interesting to examine. Previous studies report that bilingual speakers use different strategies when assigning gender-agreement in code-switched Determiner Phrases (DPs) where the determiner comes from a gender-carrying language and the noun from a language without gender. Valdés Kroff, in his study (2016) found evidence in favour of the default strategy proposed earlier by Poplack, Pausada & Sankoff (1982). He examined mixed DPs in the Bangor Miami Corpus. He found that Spanish determiners were almost all masculine gendered and used as a default. A second strategy proposed by Liceras et al. (2008) suggests that translation equivalent of the noun will determine the gender of the Spanish determiner in Spanish-English bilingual speech. A third possible strategy, found by Parafita Couto et al. (2016), is that the gender-assignment in Basque-Spanish language pair is determined by a phonological cue. This means that nouns ending on-a, mostly trigger the Spanish feminine la determiner in mixed DPs. The aim of the present study is to determine which of these strategies are mostly used in each community and to look if, and how, these communities differ. The bilingual speech production of 104 participants were examined through a Map Task, across four Spanish-English communities: Pennsylvania State University (PSU) (USA), San Juan, (Puerto Rico, USA), El Paso (Texas, USA) and Granada (Spain)). Results showed, that in bilingual DPs, Spanish masculine determiner occurred more frequently as a default strategy, than the analogical strategy in both San Juan and PSU. Interestingly, in Granada and El Paso, both the default and the translation equivalent strategies are almost equally used. In conclusion, these bilingual communities with the same language pair, have different strategies for gender-assignment in bilingual DPs. As suggested by Valdés Kroff (2016), this can be explained by specific community norms that result in linguistic variation across communities.Show less
