The emergent grammar of bilinguals: The Spanish verb hacer "do' with a bare English infinitive

This study examines the bilingual compound verb hacer to do'+Verb(Eng), consisting of the Spanish verb hacer do' and a bare English infinitive (e.g. hacer smoke to smoke'). In studies of Spanish/English bilingual speech, hacer+Verb(Eng) has received attention due to its linguistically hybrid nature. Examining 116 tokens of hacer+Verb(Eng) from 12 speakers of the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual Corpus, we test the claim that this construction has developed out of a higher cognitive load or lexical gap experienced by bilingual speakers, create a discourse profile of the construction, and propose an overview of the bilingual behaviors that contribute to the emergence of this bilingual compound verb. The construction is not found in conjunction with significantly higher rates of disfluencies, which weakens the previously made assertions that it is produced to compensate for a lexical gap. We find that hacer+Verb(Eng) is a productive bilingual construction in which hacer serves as a tense, aspect and mood marker and the English infinitive provides the lexical content. Linguistic behavioral profiles reveal that combining languages within a single prosodic unit is correlated with higher rates of hacer+Verb(Eng).