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This exploratory study sheds new light on the use of two types of agarrar ‘grab, take’ verb constructions that remain virtually unexamined in studies of language contact between Spanish and English; namely, ‘agarrar + NP’ constructions and agarrar y ‘take and’ pseudocoordination. An intergenerational analysis of 313 verb constructions, extracted from interviews, reveals that within the last four to five decades there has been an increase in the production of bilingual agarrar verb constructions among younger age groups in Northern Belize. The verb agarrar co-occurs mainly with abstract nouns and is conducive to Spanish/English code-switching. Notably, agarrar has been generalized along the lines of the English verb ‘take’ rather than ‘get’, as in the case of Texas Spanish. This suggests that agarrar has the grammatical status of a light verb when it co-occurs with nominal complements, contrary to other varieties, which use other verbs of the same semantic family. In contrast to ‘agarrar + NP’ constructions, agarrar y pseudocoordination is less conventionalized, infrequent, and favoured particularly in the preterite and present. Our findings suggest that agarrar is in an advanced stage of grammaticalization in Northern Belizean Spanish compared to other varieties.

This exploratory study sheds new light on the use of two types of agarrar ‘grab, take’ verb constructions that remain virtually unexamined in studies of language contact between Spanish and English; namely, ‘agarrar + NP’ constructions and agarrar y ‘take and’ pseudocoordination. An intergenerational analysis of 313 verb constructions, extracted from interviews, reveals that within the last four to five decades there has been an increase in the production of bilingual agarrar verb constructions among younger age groups in Northern Belize. The verb agarrar co-occurs mainly with abstract nouns and is conducive to Spanish/English code-switching. Notably, agarrar has been generalized along the lines of the English verb ‘take’ rather than ‘get’, as in the case of Texas Spanish. This suggests that agarrar has the grammatical status of a light verb when it co-occurs with nominal complements, contrary to other varieties, which use other verbs of the same semantic family. In contrast to ‘agarrar + NP’ constructions, agarrar y pseudocoordination is less conventionalized, infrequent, and favoured particularly in the preterite and present. Our findings suggest that agarrar is in an advanced stage of grammaticalization in Northern Belizean Spanish compared to other varieties.

Even though it has been previously suggested that Spanglish is not exclusive to the US, research on this sociolinguistic phenomenon has focused on the US Hispanophone context, thus providing a limited understanding of how the US compares to Belize and Gibraltar, two language contact situations where Spanglish is also attested. This paper fills this gap by bringing together insights from scholarship on these three contexts where Spanish has been in prolonged contact with English. To this end, this article highlights some of the key debates and discussions regarding Spanglish. It also introduces the reader to some similarities between the US, Belize and Gibraltar and posits that there are Spanglish phenomena, which necessarily entail the reevaluation of the role that structural hybridity plays in Spanglish. Lastly, through an overview of comparative analyses that have been conducted more recently, we illustrate the importance of this work in elucidating our knowledge of the remarkable patterns of uniformity and variability that characterize the dynamic nature of Spanglish varieties in different parts of the world today.

While it has been contended that the tap/trill intervocalic contrast has been lost in many Spanish varieties, maintenance of the normative intervocalic tap/trill contrast has been attested via segmental duration rather than the number of lingual contacts. The present paper investigates the neutralization of the intervocalic rhotic contrast in emerging, bi-dialectal speakers of Northern Belizean Spanish, an understudied variety of contact Spanish with innovative patterns of rhotic distribution. Acoustic analysis of data from 10 adolescent speakers from Orange Walk, Belize showed that in the elicited, oral production data, speakers were able to more consistently maintain their native Spanish variety's intervocalic tap/retroflex approximant phonemic contrast. However, in an effort to phonetically switch to a more standard variety of Spanish in the read-aloud task, speakers' overgeneralization of the tap led to neutralization of the tap/trill contrast and partial loss of their native Spanish variety's intervocalic phonemic contrast.