14 Alternating or Mixing Languages? Rena Torres Cacoullos and Catherine E. Travis 14.1 Introduction Must language contact and change be bedfellows? Do bilinguals inevitably mix, or grammatically blend, their languages? Some notion of language mixing is implied by blended labels such as ‘Spanglish’ or ‘Türkendeutsch,’ and a growing number of articles, books, and conferences on bilingualism are spotlighting contact effects. In this chapter, we implement a convergence evaluation metric that is based on comparison of variable linguistic structures to assess hypothesized contact-induced grammatical change. As a case study of the evaluation metric we take subject pronoun expression, a showpiece of convergence for non-null-subject languages in contact with null-subject languages, such as Turkish spoken in the Netherlands and Spanish in the United States (e.g., Doğruöz and Backus 2007; Silva-Corvalán 1994: 145–165). Here, we travel to New Mexico in the southwestern United States to observe the most intimate contact between languages – as spoken by the same bilinguals. For subject expression as a linguistic variable, the competing variants are pronominal and unexpressed subjects, illustrated in (1) for Spanish and (2) for English. 1 (1) Manuel: ... yØ me escamé poco, pero yo dije, ... vine a lo que vine. Manuel: ‘... and (I) got a little anxious, but I said, ... it is what it is.’ (NMSEB 16.1, 24:54–24:57) 1 Examples are produced verbatim from the transcripts. Transcription conventions are presented in the Appendix. Within parentheses following the examples is the corpus name (New Mexico Spanish–English Bilingual, NMSEB; Corpus of Conversational Colombian Spanish, CCCS; Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, SBCSAE), the recording number, and the beginning–ending time stamps of the lines reproduced for NMSEB or line numbers for the CCCS and SBCSAE examples. Speaker names are pseudonyms. 287 at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108623469.014 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. UQ Library, on 02 Dec 2021 at 01:49:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available