Inalienable possession in Spanish-English code-switching: Acceptability data from US heritage speakers of Spanish

Article published in Spanish as a Heritage Language.

Intraclausal code-switching is a common bilingual phenomenon that occurs when multiple languages are used in the same utterance. Research has shown that such switching is not arbitrary, but rather systematic and rule-governed. By looking at the syntactic interactions between languages, we can shed light on our understanding of a variety of structural factors as well as bilingual grammars more generally. The present study focuses on data from Spanish- English inalienable possession, which is manifested differently in the two languages (e.g., he washed his face vs. él se lavó la cara ‘(lit.) he to himself washed the face’). The results of an acceptability judgment task completed by US heritage speakers of Spanish suggest that regardless of the direction of the switch, an English-like structure is preferred with a possessive determiner (e.g., he washed su cara), and in the case of a Spanish verb switched with an English object, the preverbal clitic is required as well (e.g., él se lavó his face). Overall, the findings support the view that multiple bilingual alignments (Sánchez, 2019) can be accessed by these individuals both in their monolingual Spanish and in code-switching, suggesting that the bilingual alignments hypothesis can be a useful lens for understanding code-switching patterns.