The permeability of tag questions in a language contact situation The case of Spanish-Portuguese bilinguals Ana M. Carvalho and Joseph Kern University of Arizona | The University of Virginia’s College at Wise In this paper, we utilize negative polarity tag questions in order to assess to what extent discourse-pragmatic variables are susceptible to language contact induced changes. Based on a comparison of forms and functions of negative tags in the varieties spoken by Portuguese-Spanish bilinguals in a community on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border with the one spoken by monolinguals in the Uruguayan capital, we aimed at assessing to what extent any diferences in this variable behavior may be afected by contact with Portuguese. Our results indicate that, despite the high permeability of discourse-pragmatic features in contact situations attested in the literature and the presumed tendency for cognate languages to converge, the forms and functions of negative tags in bilingual Spanish did not radically difer from the monolingual variety. We found, instead, an intricate pattern of convergences and divergences that challenges the presupposed assumptions about extreme permeability of cognate discourse pragmatic systems in contact. Keywords: language contact, discourse markers, tag questions, bilingualism, Portuguese, Spanish, border 1. Introduction There is plenty of evidence by now that discourse-pragmatic features can be extremely permeable and susceptible to borrowing in bilingual discourse (Dajko and Carmichael 2014; Myers-Scotton and Jake 1995, among others). This counters the generalization that only content words such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives are likely to be borrowed in contact situations. By framing discourse organization as opposed to participating in sentence formation, discourse-pragmatic features may be expected to be highly permeable since they can be freely incorporated https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18068.car | Published online: 21 August 2019 Pragmatics issn 1018-2101 | e‑issn 2406-4238 © John Benjamins Publishing Company