Social factor comparisons of noun and verb insertion patterns in Spanish and English bilingual clauses

Abstract

This paper compares noun and verb insertion in bilingual clauses in a Spanish and English bilingual data corpus collected in northeast Georgia (U.S.A.).   Even though Myers-Scotton and Jake (2014) have given grammatical reasons why verbs theoretically can be as easily inserted as nouns, most bilingual data corpora, from many different language contact settings, show that far more nouns than verbs of one language are inserted into clauses of the other language.  The northeast Georgia Hispanic community data set examined here is no exception. Analysis of the northeast Georgia data reveal that some social factors are associated with higher EL verb use. Children, who have more English proficiency in general than adults, insert more verbs into bilingual clauses than adults.  Female gender, higher socio-economic status, and other than Mexican national origin are also associated with higher EL verb use.