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The increasing diversity of the U.S. Latino population has given rise to a growing population of \"mixed\" Latinos. This is a study of such individuals raised in Chicago, Illinois who have one Mexican parent and one Puerto Rican parent, most of whom call themselves \"MexiRicans.\" Given that these two varieties of Spanish exhibit highly salient differences, these speakers can be said to experience intrafamilial dialect contact. The book first explores the lexicon, discourse marker use, and phonological features among two generations of over 70 MexiRican speakers, finding several connections to parental dialect, neighborhood demographics, and family dynamics. Drawing from critical mixed race theory, it then examines MexiRicans' narratives about their ethnic identity, including the role of Spanish features in the ways in which they are accepted or challenged by monoethnic, monodialectal Mexicans and Puerto Ricans both in Chicago and abroad. These findings contribute to our understandings of dialect contact, U.S. Spanish, and the role of language in ethnic identity.

The Spanish language and Hispanic culture have left indelible impressions on the landscape of the southwestern United States. The role of cultural and geographical influence has had dramatic effects on the sustainability of the Spanish language and also its development and change. In a linguistic exploration that delves into a language as it is spoken by the Hispanic population of New Mexico and southern Colorado, historical substantiation shows the condition of New Mexican Spanish and what the future holds for its speakers. With two major dialect regions, one in the north and one in the south, detailed maps illustrate the geography of linguistic variation for the Spanish spoken in the region, whose generations of speakers were not only influenced by other languages, but also developed their own variations of words and structure out of need or innovation. This diverse language has evolved since its origin in Spain with influences that include Native American languages, exposure to English, and Mexican immigration in the twentieth century. Snippets of New Mexican folklore and folk etymology give voice to that evolution. Though this work doesn't attempt to save the New Mexican Spanish language, Bills and Vigil detail the effects of inevitable encroachment that intensified during the twentieth century and seriously threaten the continued viability of this unique dialect.

The purpose of this research is to analyse the pragmatic development of language groups at different proficiency levels and to investigate the relationship between interlanguage pragmatics and grammatical competence. For this study, 36 native Spanish speaking EFL learners at different proficiency levels were asked to respond in English to 24 different situations that called for the speech acts of request and apology. Results showed three important aspects. The first finding suggested that basic adult learners possess a pragmatic knowledge in their L1 that allows them to focus on the intended meaning and, in most cases, to assemble an utterance that conveys a pragmatic intention and satisfies the communicative demands of a social situation. The second finding revealed that there are two essential conditions to communicate a linguistic action: the knowledge of the relevant linguistic rules and the knowledge of how to use them appropriately and effectively in a specific context. The findings further suggested that advanced learners possess the grammatical knowledge to produce an illocutionary act, but they need to learn the specific L2 pragmatic conventions that enable them to know when to use these grammatical forms and under which circumstances.

The book provides a new angle for the study of otherwise amply discussed discourse and interactional phenomena. The new perspective consists in addressing the interconnections between resonance, stance, represented discourse and joking in Mexican conversational discourse. In so doing, it contributes to a better understanding of the interplay between collaboration, intersubjectivity and emergence, among other relevant issues. Scholars and advanced students concerned with dialogic syntax theory, stance theory and Spanish, will find the present analysis interesting and innovative. However, the writing and methodology, based on clearly discussed and presented examples from selected conversational excerpts, including graphic representations of linguistic and discourse data, makes the analysis easy to follow also to non-specialists. The book is thus interesting to a broad circle of readers, whether they are concerned with any of the issues dealt with or with their mutual connections, whether they are specialists or not.

This article presents an ethnographic study of how bilingual teachers and children use their home language, TexMex, to mediate academic content and standard languages. From the premise that TESOL educators can benefit from a fuller understanding of students' linguistic repertoires, the study describes language practices in a second-grade classroom in a transitional bilingual education program in a well-established Mexican American community in San Antonio, Texas. The data suggest that the participants move fluidly between not just Spanish and English, but also the standard and vernacular varieties, a movement that is called translanguaging (O. García, 2009). Translanguaging through TexMex enables the teacher and students to create discursive spaces that allow them to engage with the social meanings in school from their position as bilingual Latinos. The teacher's adoption of a flexible bilingual pedagogy (Creese & Blackledge, 2010) allows for translanguaging in the classroom not only as a way of making sense of content and learning language, but also as a legitimized means of performing desired identities.

Linguistic variation in space reflects patterns of social interaction. Gravity models have been successfully used to capture the role of urban centers in the dissemination of innovations in the speech community along with the diffusion of variants in space. Crucially, the effects of the factors of a gravity model (distance and population size) depend on language situation and may result from different sources, in particular processes of vertical and horizontal convergence. In the present study, we investigate lexical variation in contemporary Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of Mexico, spoken in a situation of generalized bilingualism. This language situation lacks some crucial ingredients of vertical convergence: no variety of Yucatec Maya has the status of a standard variety: the language of administration and education is Spanish (diglossia-with-bilingualism). The present study finds evidence of convergence processes that can be exclusively attributed to horizontal convergence. The lexical distance between speakers decreases in and between urban centers, variants with a large distribution are more likely in areas with a maximum of interactions with other areas. Even Spanish variants are distributed in the sample with a pattern that reveals processes of horizontal convergence: their distribution is accounted for through an areal bias (widespread in areas with a stronger exposition to Spanish) rather by influences from the urban centers (as centers of administration/education) to the rural areas in their surroundings.

Constraints on linguistic variation are consistent across adult speakers, yielding probabilistic and systematic patterns. Yet, little is known about the development of such patterns during childhood. This study investigates Spanish subject pronoun expression in naturalistic data from 154 monolingual children in Mexico, divided into four age groups: 6–7, 8–9, 10–11, 12+. Results from logistic regressions examining five predictors of pronoun expression in 6,481 verbs show that children's usage is structured and patterned. The study also suggests a developmental progression: as children get older, they become sensitive to more constraints. I conclude by suggesting that children learn patterns of variation by attuning to distributional tendencies in the input, and that the more frequent the patterns are, the easier they are to detect and learn.

New Mexico is located along the U.S.–Mexico border, and as such, Spanish, English, and language mixing form an integral part of the New Mexican identity. New Mexico is often divided into a northern and a southern region with the north known for Spanish archaisms due to historic isolation, and the south associated with ties to a Mexican identity due to the location of the U.S.–Mexico border. The current study uses perceptual dialectology to capture the way in which speakers in the south of New Mexico perceive this north/south divide and communicate their identity. Overall, there is evidence of the north/south divide, but speakers in southern New Mexico focus much more on language use such as Spanglish, English, and Spanish than on their northern counterparts. Participants reference language mixing over language “purity” and borders over an explicit rural/urban divide. Like previous accounts, we see reference to the “correctness” of both English and Spanish, examples of specific terminology used in different parts of the state, and descriptions of accents throughout the state.

Structural priming refers to the process whereby the use of a syntactic structure in an utterance functions as a prime on a subsequent utterance, such that that same structure is repeated. This article investigates this phenomenon from the perspective of first-person singular subject expression in Spanish. Two dialects and two genres of spoken Spanish are studied: New Mexican narratives and Colombian Spanish conversation. An analysis of 2,000 verbs occurring with first-person singular subjects reveals that subject expression undergoes a priming effect in both data sets, but that the effect is more short-lived in the Colombian data. This is found to be attributable to the interactional nature of these data, showing that the need to deal with interactional concerns weakens the priming effect. As the first study to compare priming of subject expression across distinct genres, this article makes an important contribution to our understanding of this effect, and in particular, of factors that play a role in its maintenance or dissipation in discourse.I would like to thank Rena Torres Cacoullos for her many invaluable comments on this article and Jill Morford and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi for helpful discussion on the notion of priming. I also gratefully acknowledge Jessi Aaron and Matt Alba for help with the coding and analysis; Neddy Vigil and Garland Bills for making the New Mexican data available to me; Ana Aurora Medina Murillo for help with the transcription of the NM data; and María Elena Rendón, Marianne Dieck, and Rocío Amézquita for the collection and transcription of the Colombian data.