Research Symposium

BIO

I am a first-year student from Atlanta, GA interested in pursuing fashion design. I am bilingual (English and Spanish) and I plan on minoring in linguistics. In my free time, I enjoy participating in all of the arts including drawing and painting, playing guitar, crocheting, and more.

Ambiguous Relative Clauses in Spanish-English Codeswitching Across Two Bilingual Communities

Abstract

Every language has its own distinct sentence structure in which a verb is assigned to a particular subject depending on its placement within a sentence. For example, in the sentence, “I do not like the boy who demanded an apology’s teacher,” it is clear the boy demands the apology, not the teacher. However, some sentences contain ambiguous verb allocations; These are called ambiguous relative clauses: “I do not like the teacher of the boy who demanded an apology.” In this sentence, it is unclear as to whether it is the teacher or the boy who demands the apology. In the English language, people will generally conclude that the verb is applied to the boy rather than to the teacher. However, in other languages such as Spanish, this same sentence would typically be interpreted as the teacher demanding an apology, not the boy. While there are studies that explore subject to verb assignments in both English and Spanish, this research has only studied bilinguals in unilingual contexts. This dissertation project examines how Spanish-English bilinguals’ code-switching affects verb allocations. More specifically, the project investigates this phenomenon in Tallahassee, Florida, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Keywords: Linguistics, Spanish, language, eye-tracking, code-switching