Osmer Balam

The College of Wooster

We examined gender assignment patterns in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children, paying particular attention to the influence of three gender assignment strategies (i.e., analogical gender, masculine default gender, phonological gender) that have been proposed to constrain the gender assignment process in Spanish/English bilingual speech...

In the present study, we investigated estar constructions in the Spanish/English codeswitching variety of Northern Belize, which is well known for its prolific use of hacer bilingual compound verbs in code-switched speech. To this end, we extracted and analyzed 364 unilingual Spanish and 158 bilingual estar constructions from naturalistic speech in...

In previous research, there has been an emphasis on differentiating and distancing translanguaging from codeswitching, partly on the basis that the latter refers to the combination of two discrete systems that correspond to named languages. While this is the mainstream view, there are codeswitching scholars who have proposed alternative views that...

Objectives/research questions We examined stative and eventive passive bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) in Spanish/English code-switching. Of particular interest to us was the availability of passivization in bilingual eventive passive hacer “do” constructions, purportedly banned in bilingual speech due to a universal syntactic restriction. Methodo...

Objectives/research questions We investigate two understudied bilingual compound verbs that have been attested in Spanish/English code-switching; namely, ‘ hacer + V Inf ’ and ‘ estar + V Prog ’. Specifically, we examined speakers’ intuitions vis-à-vis the acceptability and preferential use of non-canonical and canonical hacer ‘to do’ or estar ‘to...

The propagation of plants through stem subdivision and the incorporation of phytoregulators can be a viable and efficient technique in the large-scale production of young forage palm at a lower cost. This study was conducted in order to evaluate the influence of stem subdivision and phytoregulators on the production of young forage palms under gree...

The current study investigates DP-internal adjectives in Spanish/English code-switching (CS). Specifically, we analyze two concomitant phenomena that have been previously investigated; namely, the distributional frequency and placement of adjectives in mixed determiner phrases (DPs). A total of 1680 DPs (477 monolingual Spanish and 1203 Spanish/Eng...

Through the analysis of survey and interview data, we investigated the attitudes and perceptions of 32 multilingual teachers of Spanish in Belize, a code-switching (CS) context where Spanish is in intense contact with English and Belizean Kriol. More specifically, we examined teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward Spanish and CS and teachers’ per...

In [1] (p. 2), we highlight that Deuchar and Stammers [2] postulate that their data does not support Poplack and Meechan's assumption that the distinction between code-switching and borrowing is categorical [3].[...]

In introducing this inaugural Special Issue for the open access journal Languages, it is important to understand the concept of linguistic creativity and how this relates to code-switching (henceforth CS)1, a common practice in bi/multilingual communities.[...]

The present study examines two aspects of determiner phrases (DPs) that have been previously investigated in Spanish/English code-switching; namely, the openness of semantic domains to non-native nouns and gender assignment in monolingual versus code-switched speech. The quantitative analysis of naturalistic, oral production data from 62 native spe...

The present study provides a quantitative analysis of mixed verbs in the naturalistic speech of 20 Northern Belize bi/multilinguals of two different age groups (ages 14–20 and ages 21–40). I examined the relative frequency of Spanish/English mixed verbs vis-a-vis syntactic verb type and phrasal verbs in mixed verbs. Results showed that the token fr...

This paper provides an insight into the syntactic evolution of bilingual light verb constructions in Northern Belize Spanish/English/Kriol code-switching. Quantitative analyses of syntactic verb type and pronoun type were conducted to examine the cross-generational use of these hybrid structures in the spontaneous oral production of 62bilingual/tri...

The current descriptive analysis provides a sociohistorical overview of Northern Belizean Spanish (NBS), and it elaborates on salient morphosyntactic features of this understudied contact variety, as evidenced in the naturalistic discourse of bilinguals/trilinguals from Orange Walk, Belize. In particular, we focus on ‘determiner + uno’ construction...

Attested in a wide variety of contact situations, bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) have baffled linguists, as they are innovative hybrid constructions that appear superfluous. In the current study, we examine BCVs in Northern Belize, where Spanish/English language alternation occurs alongside the pervasive use of Belizean Kriol, Belize’s lingua fran...

p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 22.5pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-left: 22.5pt; text-align: justify;"> 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...

The current study examines Mestizo adolescent and post-adolescent speakers’ overt language attitudes towards their language varieties and bilingual/trilingual codeswitching. Results show that contrary to previous studies where code-switching has typically been negatively perceived even by the speakers themselves, codeswitching has thrived in Belize...