The estar+ndo periphrasis in puerto rican bilingual speakers living in the United States
Abstract
In this research several linguistic and extralinguistic factors were considered in the use of the periphrasis estar + ndo in Puerto Rican Spanish. The speech of Puerto Rican immigrants was examined in 6 sociolinguistic interviews carried out at Indiana University (USA), altogether lasting approximately 200 minutes. The informants were between the ages of 22 and 35 (3 women and 3 men), who were pursuing studies at the Master’s and Ph.D levels. All the participants possessed a high level of bilingualism. The innovative part of this research study was the level of specifi city of the population under study: Puerto Rican Spanish speakers that possessed a similar occupational status (high academic level), immersed in an Englishspeaking environment, but displaying Puerto Rican Spanish as their dominant language. Their age was also limited to a 13 year range and their spontaneous and vernacular language was elicited through several informal sociolinguistic interviews. The quantitative analysis for this research was carried out by means of the software GoldVarb X (Lawrence, Robinson & Tagliamonte, 2001). The covariational analysis for the results obtained showed that the factor groups, namely, verbal lexical-semantic aspect, sentence aspect and sex, signifi cantly infl uenced the choice between the simple present indicative form and the progressive gerund periphrastic form. According to the results obtained, the factors that favor the periphrasis are the following: activity-consecution (within the verbal lexical-semantic aspect); the durative, progressive and limited duration aspect (within the sentence aspect); and the masculine sex. In agreement with other authors (Cortés-Torres, 2005a: 53-4), these data do not support theinfluence of the English language in Puerto Rican Spanish nor the notion of Spanish converging into English. It rather seems that the change is motivated by internal linguistic factors that correspond to the canonical use of Spanish.
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