This study investigates inalienable possession in Spanish-English code-switching among US heritage speakers, using an acceptability judgment task (AJT) and an elicited production task (EPT). Results from both tasks show a clear rejection of the English definite determiner in switched contexts, and a strong preference for a preverbal clitic with Spanish verbs, particularly in the AJT. However, the tasks diverge in production patterns, with no clitic appearing in a third of the Spanish verb tokens in the EPT, suggesting flexible bilingual alignments and a greater prevalence of English possessive determiners in code-switching contexts.
Inalienable possession in Spanish-English code-switching
Bryan Koronkiewicz 