Simplification and innovation in US Spanish

Abstract

This article discusses two phenomena of linguistic change that are taking place in the Spanish spoken by the Mexican-American community of the United States. It tries to determine whether changes occurring in descriptive discourse, specifically in the opposition ser/estar, and in conditional discourse, specifically in the apodosis of the conditional sentences with present/future reference, occur as manifestations of simplification processes. It also tries to determine the role played by the contact language in these processes of linguistic changes. The data examined show that the acceleration of the two changes in the bilingual community has been the result of processes of linguistic simplification. This strategy, used by the speakers to reduce the cognitive load, has brought about the development of linguistic systems much simpler than the previous ones. The two resulting linguistic systems represent linguistic innovations because the previous systems only had the conservative forms. The present systems have at least two forms that are competing for the same semantic domain, but the innovative forms are very powerful and their imposition seems to be probable.