This study examines the use of Spanish and English discourse markers among first, second, and third generation Spanish-speakers in Chicago, Illinois, comparing Mexican, Puerto Rican, and MexiRican speakers. We find that so is a core borrowing for all groups, although there were some differences in the frequency of usage of the discourse markers across the different Spanish dialect varieties. We also find that of all the variables analyzed, weaker Spanish proficiency is most strongly correlated with more frequent usage of so at the expense of entonces. We predict that these two discourse markers will coexist for some time, but that the frequency of so may increase and the frequency of entonces may decrease for all functions with subsequent generations.
Aaron, J.E. (2004). So respetamos un tradición del uno al otro. So and entonces in New Mexican bilingual discourse. Spanish in Context, 1(2), 161-179.
2.
Brody, J. (1987). Particles borrowed from Spanish as discourse markers in Mayan language. Anthropological Linguistics, 29(4), 507-521.
3.
Brody, J. (1995). Lending the `unborrowable': Spanish discourse markers in indigenous American languages. In C.Silva-Corvalán (Ed.), Spanish in four continents: Studies in language contact and bilingualism (pp.132-147). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
4.
Cortés Rodriguez, L. (1991). Sobre conectores, expletivos y muletillas en el español hablado. Málaga: Agora.
5.
De Genova, N., & Ramos-Zayas, A. (2003). Latino Crossings. New York: Routledge.
6.
De Rooji, V. (2000). French discourse markers in Shaba Swahili conversations . International Journal of Bilingualism, 4(4), 447-467.
7.
Fuller, J. (2001). The principle of pragmatic detachability in borrowing: English-origin discourse markers in Pennsylvania German. Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences, 39(2), 351-369.
8.
Fuller, J. (2003). Discourse marker use across speech contexts: A comparison of native and non-native speaker performance. Multilingua, 22, 185-208.
9.
Goss, E., & Salmons, J. (2000). The evolution of a bilingual discourse marking system: Model particles and English markers in German-American dialects. International Journal of Bilingualism, 4(16), 469-484.
10.
Hill, J., & Hill, K. (1986). Speaking Mexicano: Dynamics of syncretic language in Central Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
11.
Hlavac, J. (2006). Bilingual discourse markers: Evidence from Croatian-English code-switching. Journal of Pragmatics, 38, 1870-1900.
12.
Lantolf, J. (1983). Toward a comparative dialectology of U.S. Spanish . In L. Elias-Olivares (Ed.), Spanish in the U.S. Setting (pp.3-20). Rosslyn: National Clearing House for Bilingual Education.
13.
Lipski, J. (1996). Review of language contact and change. Language, 72, 146-150.
14.
Lipski, J. (2005). Code-switching or borrowing? No sé so no puedo decir, you know. In L. Sayahi & M. Westmoreland (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the second workshop on Spanish linguistics (pp.1-15). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
15.
Mougeon, R., & Beniak, E. (1986). Linguistic consequences of language contact and restriction. London: Oxford University Press.
16.
Ortiz Lopez, L., & Lacorte, M. (2005). Juntos y revueltos, hablamos? Nuevas perspectivas y debates sobre el contacto de lenguas en contextos diversos. In L. Ortiz Lopez & M. Lacorte (Eds.), Contactos y contextos lingüísticos (pp.9-28). Frankfurt : Vervuert Verlag.
17.
Pew Hispanic Center (2007). Statistical portraits of the Hispanic and foreign-born populations at mid-decade . URL (accessed 11 July 2007): http://pewhispanic.org/reports/middecade/
18.
Pons Borderia, S. (1998). Conexión y conectores: Estudios de su relación en el registro informal de la lengua. Valencia: Universidad de Valencia.
19.
Potowski, K. (2004). Spanish language shift in Chicago. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 23(1), 87-116.
20.
Potowski, K. (2008). `I was raised talking like my mom': The influence of mothers in the development of MexiRicans' phonological and lexical features . In J. Rothman & M. Niño-Murcia (Eds.), Linguistic identity and bilingualism in different Hispanic contexts (pp.201-220). New York: John Benjamins.
21.
Raymond, G. (2004). Prompting action: The stand alone `so' in ordinary conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction , 37(2), 185-218.
22.
Rumbaut, R., Massey, D., & Bean, F. (2006). Linguistic life expectancies: Immigrant language retention in Southern California. Population and Development Review, 32(3), 447- 460.
23.
Said-Mohand, A. (2006). Estudio sociolingüístico de los marcadores como, entonces, tú sabes en el habla de bilingües estadounidenses. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Romance Language and Literatures, University of Miami.
24.
Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
25.
Silva-Corvalán, C. (1994). Language contact and change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
26.
Silva-Corvalán, C. (1995). Lexico-syntactic modeling across the bilingual continuum. In F. Jacek (Ed.), Linguistic change under contact situations (pp.253-270). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyeter.
27.
Solomon, J. (1995). Local and global functions of a borrowed native pair of discourse markers in a Yucatan Mayan narrative. In J. Ahlers (Ed.), Proceedings of the 21st annual meeting of the Berkeley linguistic society, Feb. 17-20. General session and parasession on historical issues in sociolinguistics (pp.287-298). Berkeley: University of California Press.
28.
Torres, L. (2002). Bilingual discourse markers in Puerto Rican Spanish . Language in Society, 31, 65-83.
29.
Travis, C. (2005). Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter .
