Spanish-influenced lexical phenomena in emerging Miami English

Abstract

This study considers the role of Spanish-to-English calques in a variety of English that has developed alongside Spanish in Miami (U.S.). Data were obtained from three sources: (1) a production experiment (translation task) conducted with two generations of Cuban Americans, (2) a perception experiment (acceptability task) conducted with Miami-based raters and raters from a national audience using Mechanical Turk, and (3) calques and related lexico-semantic phenomena culled from a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews conducted with Latinx college students. Results of the production task show that Spanish-dominant participants make robust use of calque expressions; second-generation participants use them less. Results of mixed linear effects regression analysis show that Miamians perceive of local expressions more favorably than national participants, though like national raters rank non-calque expressions more highly than calques. The approval of the Miami raters to the local expressions was driven primarily by six test items: (e.g. get down from the car).