Chapter published in:
Language Variation - European Perspectives VII: Selected papers from the Ninth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9), Malaga, June 2017
Edited by Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda, Francisco Díaz Montesinos, Antonio-Manuel Ávila-Muñoz and Matilde Vida-Castro
[Studies in Language Variation 22] 2019
► pp. 218–229

Complementing in another language

Prosody and code-switching

| Pennsylvania State University
| Pennsylvania State University
In English-Spanish code-switching, the main and complement clause boundary is a site of variable equivalence between languages. Whereas the complementiser is always present in Spanish, in English it is only sometimes present, giving rise to a quantitative word string mismatch at this juncture. Comparisons with monolingual benchmarks reveal no grammatical convergence of the contact varieties in finite complementation patterns. Rather, prosody provides a solution to variable equivalence. Whereas main and complement clauses tend to be prosodically integrated by occurring in the same Intonation Unit in unilingual speech, the opposite is true when there is code-switching at the clause boundary. Prosodic distancing of the two languages at junctures of variable equivalence is thus a bilingual strategy for code-switching between separate grammars.
Keywords: prosody, complementation, code-switching, equivalence, convergence, bilingualism, English, Spanish, New Mexico, Intonation Unit
Published online: 12 December 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.22.14ste
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