Bilingual Verb Constructions in Southwestern Spanish‪.‬

ABSTRACT The Spanish of the southwestern United States employs a unique bilingual verb paradigm containing the auxiliary hacer (do) with an English bare infinitive. The discourse motivators for this construction follow what has been reported by other scholars on language contact (e.g. Zentella 1997 and Silva-Corvalan 1983), but the syntactic structure belies any sense of "typical" borrowing or code-switching. While the geographic distribution of this phenomenon appears to be limited to sections of the southwest United States (unlike other similar bilingual phenomena) and its explanation as a product of English or Spanish syntax proves problematic, parallel constructs occur in other language-contact situations throughout the world. The hacer verb is a morphosyntactic dummy auxiliary in these constructions, yet its repeated presence in different bilingual periphrases appears to be a function of its lexical nature.