abstract: Past research has isolated an extension of the copular verb estar into the domain previously sanctioned for its counterpart, ser. This extension has been found in areas of contact between American English and Spanish speaking Mexican immigrants. A similar situation of contact is in occurrence in Arizona, and this study endeavored to evaluate if this same extension was present, and to what degree. This study also explores the framework of linguistic hegemony in order to relate language attitudes in Arizona to language change in Arizona. The findings revealed minimal extension. This may be due to language maintenance in response to hegemony. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2012

This study investigates the use of and the attitudes towards anglicisms in Mexican Spanish. Our aim is to find out whether and if so in what way the use and attitudes change according to the age and gender of the speaker. The study was carried out among 24 Mexicans living in the centre of Mexico who were divided into the age groups 18-29, 30-54, 55+ as well as gender. The informants answered a questionnaire of which the first part investigated their use of anglicisms, the second part investigated their attitudes towards the same. In the first part, the participants were asked to choose between a common anglicism or its also frequently used Spanish equivalent. In the second part, the informants were requested to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement towards three negative and three positive affirmations about anglicisms. Our results show that the use of anglicisms is bigger in the youngest group of informants and decreases with the age of the participants. Also concerning the attitudes, we found a correlation with age where the two younger groups of informants express neutral attitudes towards anglicisms while the attitudes of the oldest group of participants are negative. Our results don’t show any differences between the genders neither in use nor in attitudes.

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar o léxico empregado em cartas familiares, escritas em língua italiana, por falantes italianos provenientes da região Lombardia e por seus descendentes nascidos no Brasil e residentes em São Paulo, sob duas perspectivas diferentes. Na primeira, elencaremos quais eram os assuntos mais recorrentes nas cartas, analisaremos as escolhas lexicais e verificaremos a função destas no contexto em que foram empregadas. Pretendemos, portanto, entender quais são os relatos, as histórias, as informações contidas nesses escritos, bem como o léxico empregado para a composição das cartas. A segunda perspectiva, diz respeito ao contato linguístico que houve entre italiano e português em nível lexical. Nossa proposta será demonstrar, por meio de excertos das cartas, exemplos de léxico que revelam o uso corrente da língua italiana, mesmo em contexto estrangeiro, no qual prevalecia aquele do português. Dessa forma, é nosso propósito tanto identificar e analisar o enriquecimento do leque comunicativo e cultural que esses imigrantes tiveram ao escreverem em italiano, não inibindo, porém, o uso do português (seja de maneira implícita ou explícita); como também entender se houve a formação de uma eventual variedade de italiano no interior dessa pequena comunidade. / The purpose of this study is to analyze the lexicon used in family letters, which were written in Italian by native Italian speakers from Lombardy and by their descendants who were born in Brazil and lived in São Paulo, from two different perspectives. The first one will list the most recurring topics in the letters, the lexical choices will be analyzed and their functions will be verified in the context in which they were used. Therefore, this study intends to understand the accounts, stories, and information contained in the letters, as well as the lexicon used when writing them. The second perspective is about the language contact that occurred between Italian and Portuguese at the lexical level. Excerpts from the letters were used to show examples of the lexicon, which revealed that the Italian language was widely used, regardless of the international context, in which Portuguese predominated. As a result, the study aims to identify and analyze the language and cultural enrichment that such immigrants had by writing in Italian, although it did not prevent them from using Portuguese (either explicitly or implicitly), and also understand if there has been an accidental variety of the Italian language in that small community.

This thesis examines evidence for language contact between Oscan and Greek in the corpus of Oscan inscriptions from Lucania, Bruttium and Messana. These inscriptions were written in an adapted form of the Greek alphabet from around the fourth to first century BC, with a few of the latest texts written in the Latin alphabet; as a group, these texts are referred to as ‘South Oscan’. The work draws on modern sociolinguistic theory of bilingualism and language contact alongside previous scholarship on ancient linguistics, epigraphy and archaeology. It also suggests a series of general principles for dealing with small epigraphic corpora from a sociolinguistic viewpoint. After laying out these frameworks, this work gives an introduction to the sites of the region and past scholarship on language contact in this corpus. The main body of the thesis deals with the corpus of texts from a number of complementary angles. Firstly, the adaptation of the South Oscan alphabet from the Greek alphabet is explored in detail. In particular, the development of various signs for /f/ and the use of ‘extra’ Greek characters like chi, theta and phi are investigated as evidence of ongoing contact between the languages. The rest of the thesis deals with the corpus by genre or inscription type: this includes dedications, curse tablets, legal texts, official texts (including coin legends) and funerary texts. While some types of text, such as curse tablets, show pronounced influence and borrowing from Greek, other genres such as legal or official texts show far fewer contact phenomena, even within the same community. In other instances, language contact appears to have resulted in regional linguistic developments: for example, some of the formulae used in South Oscan dedicatory and funerary texts appear to be creative adaptations arising from a combination of influences from both Oscan and Greek, without fully adopting existing models from either language. This thesis therefore stresses that communities developed norms about the appropriateness of borrowing from Greek in various kinds of texts. In many instances, linguistic and epigraphic borrowing from Greek in written texts seems to be determined by individual choice and variation within these community norms, rather than the result of incompetence.

This thesis investigates phonetic and phonological variation in the bilingual repertoire of adolescent Welsh-English bilinguals living in North Wales. It contributes to linguistic research by, firstly, providing an account of language variation in an under-studied area (N. Wales) and context (regional minority language bilingualism) and, secondly, by examining cross-linguistic variation, and the constraints on this variation, in bilingual speech. The two variables under discussion differ in how they are realised in the two languages: /l/ is thought to be heavily velarised in both languages as a result of long-term contact and phonological convergence. Variation in the production of /r/ and realisation of coda /r/ has hitherto been reported as language-specific, though frequent transfer is said to occur from Welsh to English in predominantly Welsh-speaking areas (e.g. Penhallurick 2004: 110; Wells 1982: 390).The first aim of the study is therefore to quantify claims of phonological convergence and transfer in the speech of Welsh-English bilinguals by using a variationist sociolinguistics methodology (e.g. Labov 1966), which also considers the influence of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors on variation. Particular attention is paid to differences between a majority Welsh-speaking town and a town where English is the main language. A further distinction is made between those from Welsh-speaking homes and those from English-speaking homes who have acquired Welsh through immersion education. The second aim is to make empirically-informed theoretical claims about the nature of phonological convergence and transfer, and conceptualise cross-linguistic interaction in the speech of Welsh-English bilinguals in light of existing frameworks. Data (sociolinguistic interviews and wordlists) were collected in Welsh and English from 32 Welsh-English bilinguals aged 16-18. The sample was equally stratified in terms of speaker sex, home language, and area. The two towns compared in the study are Caernarfon (N.W. Wales, where c.88% of the population speak Welsh) and Mold (N.E. Wales, where c. 20% Welsh of the population speak Welsh). The results indicate that English [ɫ] tends to be lighter than Welsh [ɫ] in word-initial onset position for females, and in word-medial intervocalic position for both males and females. The data also show linguistic influences on the realisation of [ɫ] in both languages, and differences between males and females. The realisation of coda /r/ and production of [r] and [ɾ] in English are confined to the speech of those from Welsh-speaking homes in Caernarfon. In Welsh, use of [ɹ] is widespread and is constrained by a more complex interaction between area, home language, and sex. On the basis of these findings, I conclude that features which have undergone phonological convergence due to long-term language contact may be subject to language-specific constraints when implemented phonetically. In terms of transfer, I argue for a ternary distinction between interference, transfer, and transfer which is constrained by linguistic and/or extra-linguistic factors (cf. Grosjean 2012). Finally, I suggest that Mufwene’s (2001) notion of the ‘feature pool’ is the most succinct way of conceptualising Welsh-English transfer and differentiate between more focussed accents of English and a less-focussed variety of North Wales Welsh.

In this study the linguistic situation of Gibraltar has been investigated, especially the phenomenon of the Llanito, that is, a linguistic variety that is the result of the intense contact between the English and Spanish languages in this bilingual territory. An attempt has been made to answer the following questions: When and why do Llanito speakers change languages? Is it about mixing or alternating code? Which of these two phenomena is the most frequent? How is the situation of Llanito today? In order to achieve the objectives of the study, an analysis of 10 interviews conducted within the oral history project Bordering on Britishness has been done using the qualitative method with some elements of the quantitative method. Based on the analysis, it can be seen that Llanito is in good condition in Gibraltar. The interviewees used Llanito in many different situations, among others, to talk about the circumstances of some events they were describing or to tell anecdotes. Regarding the code change, code mixing is more frequent than code alternation. The interviewees change the language very easily and naturally. One can see that the whole process is normal for them. Llanito remains the foundation of Gibraltarian identity and the differentiating element before the English and the Spanish.

In this thesis, we identify the fundamental terms required for the analysis of American variants of Spanish. We briefly present the geographical and social-historical context of Mexican Spanish, and address the heterogeneity of approaches used in related studies. We characterize the nature of the influence of indigenous languages on Mexican lexis, and give an overview of theoretical knowledge on the Spanish colloquial language. The key chapter is dedicated to the lexical particularities of Mexican Spanish, focusing on the colloquial language. We describe our specific findings in eleven sub-chapters structured according to two different criteria. We base our analysis of particular Mexican Spanish expressions mainly on the evaluation and mutual comparison of relevant lexicon entries provided by a set of selected lexicographical sources. Keywords: Mexican Spanish, lexis, variance, colloquial language, language contact

The study of Spanish in contact with Wayuunaiki has received limited attention in generative and variationist analyses. In particular, the possible influence of this indigenous language on some parts of the Spanish language has not been investigated or has been only briefly addressed. This dissertation aims to fill this existing gap by studying two morpho-syntactic variables: (i) the distribution of null and overt subjects (NOS) as portrayed by the Null Subject Parameter and overt subject personal pronoun (SPP) expression as traditionally researched in variationist studies, and (ii) the issue of subject-verb agreement within the theory of features. To carry out these studies, we collected spontaneous data from 27 Wayuunaiki-Spanish bilinguals and five Spanish monolingual speakers. This Spanish monolingual group served as the vernacular benchmark. The NOS and SPP expression are among the most studied topics in Hispanic linguistics, but they have never been systematically researched in Guajiro Spanish. By analyzing these issues in our dissertation, we want to contribute new data to their study and to the properties and factors affecting them, in order to widen the knowledge of how they function in this Spanish language contact situation. In the generative analysis of the null/overt subjects we investigate whether the distinction that occurs in Wayuunaiki between stative and active verbs and the participants’ proficiency in Spanish have an impact on the distribution of NOS in Guajiro Spanish. In the variationist study, a number of independent variables widely believed to constrain variable SPP expression are factored into the investigation to find out how they behave in this particular language contact situation. These variables include person/number, TAM, switch reference, priming effects, etc. The second research topic is subject-verb agreement. This is only investigated from the generative grammar perspective, specifically by employing the concept of features to explain the nature of the subject-verb mismatches produced by the Wayuunaiki dominant Wayuunaiki-Spanish bilinguals. We specifically investigate whether the Spanish conjugation system poses a problem to the bilingual speakers’ ability to produce the native Spanish verb forms vis-à-vis the monolingual cohort and whether this ability is shaped by the participants’ proficiency in Spanish. The results of the three studies contribute to the field of Hispanic linguistics from three different perspectives. The study of NOS adds a new dimension to the pro-drop parameter: the possible role that Wayuunaiki’s double conjugation may play in the distribution of null and overt subject pronouns in Guajiro Spanish. The variationist study provides new data on the topic of SPP expression in a variety of Spanish which, in this specific case, has as contact language an understudied indigenous language. The analysis of the subject-verb mismatches that occur in Guajiro Spanish allows us to differentiate between the status of null and overt subjects with respect to subject-verb agreement and to differentiate between this contact variety and the Colombian vernacular benchmark.

This thesis examines possible contact effects in the segmental phonology in an idiolect of Swedish Romani. From data gathered from one speaker of Swedish Romani I describe the phonology on a segmental level and then compare this with the phonology of its progenitor, Proto-Northwestern Romani. The traces of interference could in almost every case be explained as features gained from contact with Swedish. When features were judged to have entered Swedish Romani from a different language, intense contact with Swedish could possible explain why these features have remained in Swedish Romani.

Esta tesis investiga el nivel de competencia bilingüe (la capacidad de un hablante para comprender y producir en dos idiomas) de los habitantes de la región de Tres Fronteras, Sudamérica. Tres Fronteras es el nombre de la zona trifronteriza entre las ciudades de Leticia, Colombia; Tabatinga, Brasil; y Santa Rosa de Yavarí, Perú. En Tres Fronteras, las personas de los tres países pueden cruzar libremente de un país a otro, lo que crea situaciones de contacto lingüístico entre el español y el portugués. Debido a esa situación de contacto lingüístico, muchas personas de las tres ciudades tienen al menos un conocimiento básico del otro idioma. De acuerdo con la metodología de Carvalho (1998, 2003, 2006, 2016) y Alvar (1977), 42 habitantes de la región fueron entrevistados primeramente en su L1 y, posteriormente, en su L2. Luego, a esos participantes se les asignó una calificación holística de acuerdo con su competencia en su L2, según una rúbrica lingüística. Después, a los participantes se les administró una encuesta en la que respondieron preguntas basadas en su propio uso de la lengua y el uso de los dos idiomas de la región. Los resultados cualitativos y cuantitativos de los datos recopilados brindaron una nueva perspectiva sobre el nivel de bilingüismo de esa área menos estudiada en la que la mayoría de los participantes fueron bilingües con una capacidad mucho más limitada en su L2 comparada con su L1. Las excepciones a esa tendencia aparecieron caso por caso con los participantes con experiencia significativa viviendo en el país de la L2 (brasileños viviendo en Colombia o Perú, o viceversa) siendo bilingües con altos niveles de competencia en su L2. Las similitudes entre el español y el portugués y la nivelación dialectal también parecen contribuir a la falta de motivación para dominar la L2, ya que la mayoría de las personas en el país que habla la L2 puede entender, en su mayor parte, el otro idioma con un cierto nivel de inteligibilidad mutua.