Cathereine Travis, University of New Mexico
At least since Gumperz and Wilson (1971:165), it has been inferred that codeswitching promotes grammatical convergence, whereby languages in contact
“gradually become more like each other” (Aikhenvald 2002:1). We test this inference by investigating Spanish variable first-person singular subject (yo ‘I’) expression in conversations of New Mexican speakers of Spanish and English.
Adopting the variationist comparative method (Labov 1966, Poplack & Meechan
1998), we compare patterns of subject expression in speakers’ “bilingual mode” with those in the same speakers’ “monolingual mode” (Grosjean 1998), operationalized as the presence versus the absence of code-switching in the discourse. We find a slightly higher rate of yo when speakers have recently used
English, however multivariate analysis reveals that this is attributable not to the code-switching per se, but to the presence of an expressed firstpersonsingular subject I in the preceding English, which we interpret as a cross-linguistic priming effect. The data thus do not support Spanish convergence with English in New
Mexico, nor code-switching as a mechanism of contact-induced change.
Furthermore, comparisons between patterns of Spanish yo and English stressed I in fact contradict the received functional equivalence of Spanish pronouns and English stressed pronouns (e..g., Givón 1983:17, Payne 1997: 43). These findings illustrate how intra-linguistic variability may serve to distinguish superficial from structural inter-linguistic similarity and thereby evaluate and gauge contactinduced change.