Date of Award

2024-08-01

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Linguistics

Advisor(s)

Natalia Mazzaro

Abstract

The linguistic variant haiga in the Ciudad Juárez, Mexico – El Paso, Texas border region is often a stigmatized feature within the bilingual community. This non-standard form, derived from haya (the present subjunctive of haber “to be” in Spanish) carries negative social connotations and is often perceived as incorrect. Our aim was to investigate the use and attitudes towards haiga in the bilingual population at the U. S. – Mexico border. A text infilling task was employed to elicit the use of haiga and an attitude elicitation task using memes was used to investigate the participants attitudes towards the form. The text infilling task revealed an important overall occurrence of haiga. Results showed that the Spanish-dominant bilinguals had the lowest usage of haiga and the strongest negative attitudes towards it. English-dominant bilinguals had the highest use of haiga and less negative attitudes overall towards it. Among English dominant bilinguals, those whose first language is English did not show a clear pattern of assigning specific sociolinguistic indexes to the use of haiga. The text infilling task also showed an overall preference for using haiga when presented as a main verb as compared to an auxiliary verb. Our results also pointed to a positive shift in attitudes towards haiga, as it is not associated with rurality and lack of class, but to a characteristic feature of border speech, and used mainly in informal contexts.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

73 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Elyana Amparan

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