Rena Torres Cacoullos
 

Keynote Address

Rena Torres Cacoullos, Penn State University

Rena Torres Cacoullos is Liberal Arts Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. She is co-editor of Language Variation and Change and a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). She looks for quantitative patterns in everyday language use. Her classes are on grammatical variation across the Spanish-speaking world, cognitive and social factors in language change, and grammar from a usage-based perspective. Co-author of Bilingualism in the Community: Code-switching and Grammars in Contact, most recently she has tried to understand language variability and changeability across bilingual speakers. Applying the tools of linguistic variation theory pioneered by William Labov to bilingual speech communities, her studies show that bilinguals who regularly use both their languages are adept at keeping them connected, yet separate.

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.