Spanglish demonstrates great influence of its two “mother” tongues in the realm of morphology, so for the sake of brevity I’ll limit this discussion to the morphological characteristics unique to Spanglish. An interesting feature of Spanglish morphology is the ability of its speakers to maintain grammatical “correctness” in both languages at all times. While code switching at the word or even clausal level is fairly simple to employ without losing grammaticality, speakers code-switching on an intra-sentential level are able to alternate among multiple constituents without error (Torres 330). According to Torres, Spanglish speakers follow two major grammatical constraints: the free morpheme constraint and the equivalency constraint.
The equivalency constraint states what has already been cited, that no switch may occur where it would produce an ungrammatical structure in either language. The free morpheme constraint declares that no switching may occur between bound morphemes (in English, think ‘–ness’ to convert adjectives to nouns – it may not exist alone and retain its meaning). However, other Spanglish researchers have indicated lexical items which appear to do precisely this. For example, Stavans cites the use of “jangear” to mean “to hang out.” ‘–ear’ is a bound morpheme in Spanish which creates a verb; perhaps Torres means to specify that bound morphemes may be applied to new roots but not interchanged freely. He does prescribe to a more conservative school of thought on Spanglish than other researchers, such as Stavans. Torres praises Stavans’ work but notes that his translation of Don Quijote is frequently ungrammatical.
Torres, Lourdes. "Don Quixote in Spanglish: Traddutore, traditore?". Romance Quarterly 52.4 (2005 Fall), pp. 328-334
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