Paper presented at the UIC Bilingualism Forum, Chicago, Illinois. [PDF]
This study explores how bilinguals handle inalienable possession in Spanish-English code-switching, focusing on the interaction of possessive and definite determiners with clitics. Results from an acceptability judgment task reveal that participants preferred possessive determiners with English verbs and clitic + possessive constructions with Spanish verbs, though predictions were only partially confirmed. The findings suggest that while the verb determines the presence of a clitic, the language of the determiner does not fully predict the features of possession, highlighting the complex relationship between clitics and determiners in bilingual grammars.
Bryan Koronkiewicz 