
Keynote Address
Rena Torres Cacoullos, Penn State University
Sociolinguistic experience: Explaining language contact without grammatical convergence
Rena Torres Cacoullos • Penn State University
Grammatical convergence is an often-asserted outcome of language contact, attributed to the cognitive demands of bilingualism and a consequent preference for shared features. But mounting studies counter the inevitability of convergence, showing grammatical difference despite contact. By studying language variation in bilingual speech, we find an explanation in language use. We assess three pairs of Spanish-English parallel structures that are distinctly different: the other-language counterpart is invariable (complementizer presence), is absent (complement-clause subjunctive), or is classified as a typologically distinct feature (subject pronoun expression). Convergence between languages is tested by comparing the probabilistic contextual constraints on grammatical structures internal to each language. Data are from the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual corpus, from a longstanding community, where Spanish and English alternate in everyday speech. Speakers who regularly use each of their languages maintain both, aligned with their respective monolingual benchmarks rather than with each other: sociolinguistic experience determines the outcomes of contact.