The imperfect progressive in Puerto Rican Spanish: a case of language contact or grammaticalization?

Abstract

Abstract The present study examines the use of the Spanish imperfect progressive in Puerto Rican Spanish to determine if this construction is influenced by English, or if it is responding to internal grammaticalization processes as defined as the process in which a lexical item acquires a grammatical function. 33 Puerto Ricans that lived in Puerto Rico completed a sociolinguistic interview and two retell tasks. The English influence hypothesis is discarded since the results indicate that the imperfect progressive is slowly grammaticalizing as a past imperfective, which explains why it can be used with all verbs classes and to express habitual events. Pre-existing work in the field proposes that progressive constructions can develop as imperfective markers. This finding supports the present progressive hypothesis which states that it grammaticalizes from a locative to a progressive expression, and later develops a habitual meaning. Finally, it is possible that some cases of language variation and change are due to grammaticalization processes, language contact, or language contact induced grammaticalization.