Diminutive expressions in Spanish-English language contact settings : a multimethod and multifactorial account

Given the formal and functional variability of the diminutive construction across languages, the question arises of how speakers who know and use multiple languages on a daily basis express diminutives in bilingual interactions, especially when those languages form diminutives in different ways (e.g., synthetically, via suffixes, or analytically, using lexical forms) and tend to use them with different meanings (e.g., to express subjective attitudes or simply reduction), like Spanish and English. Surprisingly, this construction has been largely overlooked in language contact research, although it provides a unique opportunity to investigate how bilinguals navigate linguistic phenomena that display structural and meaning-related differences in the contact languages. By examining the formation and use of diminutives in Spanish-English bilingual speech in the United States, this study is the first to investigate the integral diminutive paradigm of bilingual speakers—encompassing Spanish, English, and mixed diminutives—from a multidimensional perspective, looking into its structural properties, its meanings, and the sociolinguistic factors that contribute to its variation. Moreover, by focusing on two communities, El Paso (Texas) and Miami (Florida), this study explores the unique interplay of extralinguistic factors and the linguistic outcomes of language contact. Specifically, this study addresses six research objectives. I. Delineate the diminutive paradigm used by bilingual speakers in El Paso and Miami. II. Examine the influence of language contact on the structural outlook of the diminutive paradigm. III. Investigate the patterns of codeswitching underlying mixed diminutive constructions and explore whether codeswitching theory can account for the attested variation in these forms. IV. Map the meanings with which diminutives are used in bilingual speech and investigate the interaction between diminutive form and meaning. V. Assess the relative weight of structural, meaning-related, sociodemographic, and situational factors as well as factors related to speakers’ bilingual experience in shaping diminutive formation and usage. VI. Explore the patterns of uniformity and variability in diminutive formation and usage by speakers from two distinct Spanish-English language contact settings. A bipartite methodology is employed to achieve these goals, consisting of a corpus analysis of spontaneous bilingual conversations and an experimental acceptability judgment task. Specifically, the corpus analysis relied on data from the Bangor Miami Corpus, available online, and the El Paso Bilingual Corpus, newly created for the purposes of this study. The experimental analysis implemented a two-alternative forced choice task conducted in both communities. The findings indicate that while bilingual speakers in both communities have access to similar paradigms, their use of certain diminutive structures depends on the sociolinguistic characteristics of their community. As such, speakers in Miami, where English is the dominant community language, more frequently employ English and analytic diminutives compared to El Paso bilinguals. Correspondingly, both communities exhibit contact-induced changes compared to the paradigms of monolingual speakers, though the nature of these changes aligns with community-specific sociolinguistic characteristics. Furthermore, bilingual speakers rarely codeswitch within the diminutive construction, suggesting that it is an unproductive switching site. Nevertheless, some mixed diminutives remained unaccounted for by the codeswitching models under investigation. Regarding diminutive meaning, the functions with which bilinguals use diminutives are largely consistent across communities, but their frequency of use also exhibits community-specific patterns. Finally, while the sociolinguistic profile of the bilingual speaker plays a role in their frequency of use of diminutive expressions, diminutive formation chiefly depends on structural and meaning-related factors.