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THE SPANISH GERUND IN PUERTO-CRUCIAN

Melvin González-Rivera

University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez

1 Introduction

Some uses of the –ndo morpheme in Puerto Rican Spanish and in other areas where there is

extensive history of co-existence between Spanish and English have been attributed to the contact

situation between these two languages. Sánchez (2002) investigates the influence that English has

on Spanish spoken in Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao (the ABC islands) where they coexist with

Papiamentu, an Iberian lexifier Creole language. That author argues that there was a

morphosyntactic transfer of –ndo in Spanish to Papiamentu, and that later the uses of the gerund

were extended to progressive periphrasis through contact with English.Sánchez’s findings appear

to support the hypothesis that Spanish –ndo is a morpheme that favors linguistic changes through

contact with other languages, especially with English. This hypothesis has been tested with relative

success in the Spanish of the United States and Puerto Rico, as can be witnessed in the works of

Klein-Andreu (1980), Suñer (1982), and Morales (1986), among many others. In this study, I

examine the distribution of the morpheme –ndo, especially the periphrastic forms (auxiliary +

verb-ndo), in Puerto Rican-Saint Croix Spanish (puertocruceño Spanish) and compare the findings

with Puerto Rican Spanish in general. Our main hypothesis is that the grammatical behavior of –

ndo will be determined by lexical and aspectual meanings internal to Spanish (Morimoto, 2001).

According to this hypothesis, the gerund should be associated with atelic and imperfect dynamic

structures in so far as–ndo denotes an event, which unfolds at a determined moment, but for which

the beginning and end are not specified. The three research questions that will guide the

investigation are as follows:

What grammatical aspect appears with gerundive periphrasis in puertocruceño Spanish?

Which lexical aspect appears with gerundive periphrasis?

How does the behavior of the gerund in puertocruceño Spanish compare to that of the

gerund in Puerto Rican Spanish?

The remainder of the paper is divided as follows: in Section 2 (the next section) I will discuss the

distribution of –ndo in the Puerto Rican context, and examine how recent proposals concerning

the uses of the gerund do not support the hypothesis that linguistic contact is responsible for

increased use of –ndo. Section 3 will discuss the linguistic community of Puerto Rican immigrants

and descendants of Puerto Rican immigrants in Saint Croix and the variety of Spanish spoken by

them. In Section 4 I discuss the methodology used for collecting and processing the data obtained

over the course of my research and, finally, in Section 5 the results are presented and discussed.

2 The morpheme –ndo in Puerto Rican Spanish

In Puerto Rican Spanish the nonstandard uses of the gerund have been explained mostly as a result

of the linguistic contact between Spanish and English that exists on the island, as previously

mentioned. Morales (1986: 60), for example, documented a number of structures that show the

possible transfer and/or interference of English in the distribution of –ndo in the Puerto Rican

dialect. These are called Anglicized structures (i.e., a gerund with adjective value and a gerund

with nominal value):

(1) Gerund with adjective value:

a. Desapareció la cartera conteniendo dinero.

It disappeared the wallet containing money

‘The wallet containing money disappeared.’

b. Desapareció la cartera que contenía el dinero.

It disappeared the wallet that contained the money

‘The wallet that contained the money disappeared.’

(2) Gerund with nominal value:

a. Este muchacho lo que hace es comprando las muestras.

This boy what he does is buying the samples

‘What this boy does is buying the samples.’

b. Este muchacho lo que hace es comprar las muestras.

This boy what he does is to buy the samples

‘What this boy does is buy the samples.’

Standard Spanish usually prefers a relative clause (1b) and an infinitive (2b) instead of the gerund

in the constructions (1-2). Together with these innovations in the Spanish grammatical system,

Vaquero (1998) observes other possibilities for the gerund in the Puerto Rican context that can

best be explained as the result of linguistic contact: these involve the gerund with temporal value

in the present, future and past tense:

(3) Present tense:

a. El avión está saliendo ahora mismo para Miami.

The plane is leaving now right for Miami

‘The plane is leaving right now for Miami.’

b. El avión sale ahora mismo para Miami.

The plane leaves now right for Miami

‘The plane leaves right now for Miami.’

(4) Future tense:

a. El avión estará llegando a las 7 pm a Miami.

3

The plane will be arriving at 7 pm at Miami

‘The plane will be arriving at 7 pm in Miami.’

b. El avión llegará a las 7 pm a Miami.

The plane will arrive at 7pm at Miami

‘The plane will arrive at 7 pm in Miami.’

(5) Past tense:

a. La película estuvo presentándose en el cine (durante varias semanas).

The movie was it showing in the theatre (during various weeks)

‘The movie was showing in the theatre (for several weeks).

b. La película se presentó en el cine (durante varias semanas).

The movie showed in the theatre (during various weeks)

‘The movie was shown in the theatre (for several weeks).’

These data have motivated some researchers to attribute the distribution of the morpheme –ndo in

Puerto Rican Spanish to linguistic contact between Spanish and English. For these authors the

distribution of various uses of the gerund in Puerto Rican Spanish can be explained as a result of

linguistic contact, that is to say, extralinguistic factors that influence language and promote

linguistic variation which in this case results in language change. Nevertheless, this explanation

generates more problems than solutions with respect to the study of innovative uses of the gerund.

First, some of the Anglicized structures (e.g., the gerund with adjectival value) are attested in the

history of Spanish. Concerning the uses of the gerund with adjectival value, López Morales (2004:

30) notes that there is no restriction that would prevent the activation of similar previously

operative processes in the language. Second, some innovative uses of the gerund in Puerto Rican

Spanish do not necessarily have a correlation with English, that is, English would utilize other

grammatical structures and not necessarily the corresponding –ing forms. Third, there are uses of

the gerund that admit a purely linguistic explanation, internal to the system, without resorting to

external or extralinguistic factors such as contact with English: in (3a)-(5a) the verbs salir (to

leave), llegar (to arrive) and presentar (to show) have lost their aspectual value, possibly due to a

process that is called aspectual coercion (see definition 1), and denote a process, an event that takes

place or happens, hence the possibility of combining with –ndo. (5a) exploits this possibility for

the gerund to appear together with the SP durante varias semanas (for several weeks), which

permits us to conclude that the predicate of this sentence denotes an iterative aspect.

Definition 1. Aspectual Coercion: A lexical operation that changes the aspectual value of a

lexical item. Without this change, resulting combinations would not be convergent

(Translation from Bosque and Gutiérrez-Rexach, 2009: 330)

Recent proposals challenge the supposed extralinguistic influence on the synchronous uses of –

ndo. Clements (2003), for example, suggests that the uses of the gerund in Spanish as a second

language (L2) spoken by a Chinese informant correspond to atelic dynamic structures or events

without delimitation or end, and they have an imperfect aspectual value. Ortiz López (2004)

documents similar behavior in a sample of Haitian informants who speak Spanish as an L2, and

González-Rivera (2009) finds the same patterns in the use of the gerund in a sample of old Spanish

(13th century to 15th century). These findings appear to confirm the hypothesis of Torres-Cacoullos

(2000), for whom the diachronic study of the gerund shows that the linguistic change of –ndo from

old Spanish through to the current day is basically quantitative rather than qualitative in nature.

Thus, the distribution of the gerund can be attributed to internal linguistic variables, in this case,

aspectual considerations, which determine its distribution (González-Rivera, 2005). Torres-

Cacoullos (2000) proposes that the synchronic data do not support the hypothesis that linguistic

contact with English is a cause of any purported increase in frequency or wider distribution of the

gerund:

[W]e found no evidence for an increase in the frequency of estar + -ndo in bilingual

varieties with respect to comparable monolingual Spanish. To the contrary, frequency

increases are a diachronic process, one effect of which is the growing restriction of the

simple Present to non-progressive uses, especially in oral varieties. These findings cast

doubt on the notion that increased frequencies of estar + -ndo among bilinguals are the

result of convergence with English. (p. 24)

In other words, it appears that the morpheme –ndo has acquired other syntactic-semantic

possibilities in the synchrony of Spanish that, in turn, refer us to its diachrony: in the evolution

from Latin to Spanish, the gerund took on the notion of durative aspect, that is to say, it added

functions that were absent in Latin. It appears then that the Spanish gerund maintains an

accelerated evolution towards other grammatical contexts, such as the case of the gerund with

habitual value or of futurity.

Finally, non-standard uses of the gerund appear in scenarios where Spanish is not in contact with

English or is in contact with languages that are typologically distant from English, such as is the

case with cochambino Spanish of Bolivia; and spoken also in the Andean region between

Colombia and Ecuador the Haitian-influenced Spanish spoken in the eastern part of Cuba, the

Haitian-influenced Spanish spoken along the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti,

and the achinado Spanish in Madrid, among other varieties.

(6) Gerund in different dialects of Spanish:

a. Spanish in the Andean region: (Niño-Murcia, 1995)

Dame trayendo el pan.

You give me bringing the bread

‘Bring me the bread.’

b. Cochambino Spanish, Bolivia (Pfänder, 2002)

5

En ahí había estado orinandoy nosotros recién llegando.

In there he/she/it had been urinating and we recently arriving

‘In there he had been urinating and we were close to arriving.’

c. Haitian-influenced Spanish, Cuba: (Ortiz López, 1999)

Yo pierdo un hermano aquí porque está cortando caña.

I lost a brother here because he was cutting cane

‘I lost a brother here because he was cutting cane.’

d. Haitian-influenced Spanish, Dominican Republic and Haitian border: (Ortiz López,

2004)

No llevando nada, deja todo allá.

No (did not) bringing nothing, he/she/it leaves everything there

‘She is not bringing anything, she leaves everything there.’

e. Achinado Spanish, Madrid: (Clements, 2003)

Tú puede ya fuera chica, trabajando.

You can now outside girl, working

‘You can work outside now, girl.’

When we study the diachronic data of the gerund we find that the linguistic change of –ndo from

old Spanish to the present is of a quantitative nature. Thus, the supposed influence of English in

the case of the gerund in Puerto Rican Spanish would explain the frequency of use of a

morphosyntactic factor, but not the cause or origin of this factor. Saint Croix provides us a suitable

scenario in order to study the distribution of the gerund. Unlike Puerto Rico, the contact between

English and Spanish is much greater in Saint Croix than in Puerto Rico, being as varieties of

English and English lexifier Creole are the main varieties used in daily interaction on the island.

Even so, Spanish is the second most widely spoken language on the island, according to the 2000

census. If the proposal of linguistic contact as the cause of the innovative uses of –ndo is true, then

the speakers of Saint Croix dialects of Spanish ought to make greater use of the gerund than their

peers on the island of Puerto Rico.

3 Puertocruceño

3.1 Puerto Ricans in Saint Croix

There is a vast bibliography of research that documents various linguistic phenomena to be found

in Puerto Rican Spanish. The majority of these studies have approached the discourse of the

inhabitants of Puerto Rico (which includes the ‘Spanish’ Virgin Islands of Vieques and Culebra),

while others have investigated the discourse of Puerto Ricans in the United States: New York,

Chicago, Ohio and Hawaii, etc. For many years researchers have forgotten that very close to the

Puerto Rican Virgin Islands lie the British Virgin Islands and the US Virgin Islands, some of which

hosted large groups of economic migrants from Puerto Rico during the 20th century. One of these

islands is Saint Croix in the US Virgin Islands, which became an attractive destination for many

Puerto Ricans, given its proximity to Vieques and its status as a US territory. The majority of the

immigrants worked in the sugar cane fields, spoke a variant typical of their social class and did not

master any variety of English or English-lexifier Creole, the main language in use on Saint Croix.

The following fragment of one of our interviews in Saint Croix reflects this social reality:

Encuestado: Mis padres son oriundos de Vieques. Ellos emigraron para esta isla en el 1934,

en busca de mejor situación económica. […] En aquella época no había las grandes

facilidades que hay hoy en día de grandes lanchas. En aquella época (la gente) tenía que

venir en barcos de vela. Había un señor puertorriqueño que él era de Culebra, que tenía un

barco, […] tenía un barco bastante grande, transportaba tanto pasajeros como animales de

aquí para allá y de allá para acá. […] Ese señor transportó muchísima familia de Vieques

para Santa Cruz.

[Respondent: My parents are natives of Vieques. They migrated to this island in 1934, in

search of a better economic situation. […] At that time there were no big facilities like

there are today with large boats. In that era (the people) had to come in sailboats. There

was a Puerto Rican man who was from Culebra, who had a boat, […] he had a pretty big

boat, he transported people as well as animals from here to there and from there to here.

[…] This man transported many families from Vieques to Saint Croix.]

Lack of interest on the part of Puerto Rican academics in Saint Croix community is even more

astounding, if we take into account the fact that Saint Croix is home to a substantial number of

Puerto Ricans and descendants of Puerto Ricans who have maintained their Spanish language

through the years. With the exception of Simounet (1990, 1993, 1999 and 2005), their are few

scholars who have carried out more than one-offstudies on the Spanish of Saint Croix that is, the

Spanish that the Porto-Crucians speak (Simounet, personal communication). Simounet (1999) has

demonstrated that this community maintains Spanish as a marker of their identity, an attachment

to a cultural feature that possibly defines them as distinct and differentiates them from other

immigrant groups in Saint Croix. It is thus necessary to review the linguistic studies that have been

done on the discourse of Puerto Ricans in Saint Croix, in order to compare that variety with the

Spanish that is spoken in Puerto Rico and other parts of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Besides

González Rivera (2005) and Morales Reyes (2007), there are few studies that analyze the discourse

of Puerto Ricans in Saint Croix from a linguistic and formal perspective.

The diglossic situation (English/Spanish) in Saint Croix creates a suitable place to carry out

research that measures the effects of social or extralinguistic variables and internal or

intralinguistic variables in linguistic change. In other words, through this study of puertocruceño

Spanish we can investigate the variables that promote linguistic variation and, thus, language

change. In turn, this permits us to overcome the traditional dichotomy of external and internal

factors to the process of linguistic change in non-standard uses of Spanish (Pfänder, 2002). The

following section discusses the data sample of the present study.

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4 Methodology

The data for this investigation were collected in Saint Croix from the years 2002 to 2005, mainly

in the district of Christiansted. We were able to obtain highly valuable information on the Saint

Croix community and their language by means of recorded observation, conversations and

interviews. For the sake of this research a total of ten respondents comprise the sample. The data

were collected using the sociolinguistic interview model of Labov (1994), by which we can obtain

data produced in spontaneous and semi-spontaneous conversations in natural contexts of use of

the language: offices, streets, service businesses, etc. Finally, the respondents were selected by

following the deliberate sample model.

The principle variables for selection were: bilingualism, place of residence and generation of

immigration. Each respondent must have had bilingual competence in Spanish and English, have

resided in Saint Croix for at least ten years prior to the study and belonged to the first, second, or

third generation of Puerto Rican immigrants. Table 1 reviews general information (age, gender,

linguistic competence, etc.) concerning the respondents in the sample.

The respondents underwent tape recorded interviews of twenty to forty minutes. The participants

were always aware of both the objectives of the research as well as when they were being recorded.

Through the interviews we obtained a total of 6,744 verb forms, of which 295 (or 4.4%) appeared

in the –ndo affixed forms. Of these forms, 220 were analyzed in this study, specifically those which

correspond to verbal periphrasis in gerunds. Finally, the data were processed using the cross-

tabulation statistics program SPSS. The linguistic variables examined include grammatical aspect

and lexical aspect. These variables correlate in turn to the auxiliary verb used in gerundive

periphrasis.

Table 1: General information concerning the informants of Saint Croix

Participant Years Spent in

Saint Croix

Gender Birthplace Residence Generation Linguistic

Competence

01 5 M Saint Croix Saint Croix 2nd Bilingual

02 5 F Puerto Rico … 1st …

03 2 F Saint Croix … 3rd …

04 5 F Saint Croix … 2nd …

05 7 F Saint Croix … 2nd …

06 6 F Saint Croix … 2nd …

07 5 M Saint Croix … 1st …

08 9 M Puerto Rico … 2nd …

09 7 M Puerto Rico … 1st …

10 5 F Puerto Rico … 1st …

In this study, the Spanish of puertocruceños (Puerto Ricans of Saint Croix) are compared with the

Spanish of Puerto Rico as found in two corpora: Norma Popular en la Zona Metropolitana de San

Juan (Alemán 2010) and El Habla Culta de la Generación Joven de San Juan, Puerto Rico

(Benítez 2001). The results of the study are presented below.

5 Results and Discussion

5.1 Grammatical aspect

According to the data the periphrastic morpheme –ndo maintains a correlation with the imperfect

aspect in 85.5% of the cases, versus the other grammatical aspects, which reflect much smaller

percentages (Table 2).

Table 2: Grammatical aspect of the periphrastic gerund in Saint Croix

Imperfect Aorist Perfect Prospective Total

188 27 4 1 220

85.5% 12.3% 2 .2 100%

In this sense the gerund in puertocruceño Spanish is found in predicates that do not necessarily

mention the start or the end of the event described by the verbal predicate. The following examples

illustrate this property:

(7) Imperfect gerund

a. Han perdido las tradiciones y las siguen perdiendo. (02)

‘They have lost the traditions and continue to lose them.’

b. Porque esta muchacha iba caminando. (06)

‘Because this girl was walking.’

c. Estoy cogiendo clases aquí, en este edificio. (07)

‘I am taking classes here, in this building.’

In the examples in (7) we do not know when the event of perder (to lose), caminar (to walk) and

coger (to take) originated, nor do we know if the event has ended; that is, it could be the case that

the traditions of Saint Croix continue to be lost (7a), the girl continues walking (7b), or the person

continues taking classes in the same building (7c). In this sense, only the internal structure of the

situation, and not the situation in its entirety, has been confirmed.

On the other hand, when we examine the aorist aspect, that is to say, that which signals the end of

the event described by the verbal predicate, we find a very interesting fact, namely: some 63% of

the cases occur with the auxiliary ir (to go) and another 26% with the auxiliary seguir (to continue);

estar (to be) appears in only 11% of the cases.

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(8) Aorist gerund

a. Él siguió estudiando como todo el mundo aquí. (05)

‘He continued studying like everyone else here.’

b. La agricultura fue decayendo. (08)

‘Agricultura was declining.’

c. No se escuchaba nada, estuvieron llamándole por el Intercom. (09)

‘He could not hear anything, they were calling him on the Intercom.’

González-Rivera (2005) argues that the informants prefer the uses of the auxiliary ir (to go) in

gerund constructions with aorist value because through this auxiliary the speakers appear to

provide the feature [+durative] by means of an auxiliary verb of movement. In a previous study,

González Rivera (2009) documents the same pattern in the diachrony of Spanish: from the 13th to

the 15th centuries the gerund periphrasis with aorist aspect is associated with the auxiliary ir in

some 96.4% of cases. In this sense puertocruceño Spanish does not deviate from the general

tendencies of Spanish, both in its synchrony as well as its diachrony.

When we compare these findings with Puerto Rican discourse, as evidenced by El corpus del

Habla Popular and by El Habla Culta de los Jóvenes, we note that puertocruceño Spanish is very

similar to Puerto Rican Spanish: in a sample of five informants in both corpora there is a tendency

to favor the imperfect aspect in gerund periphrasis in some 89.3% of the cases (Table 3). Thus,

both in Saint Croix and in Puerto Rico, the speakers favor gerundive periphrasis with imperfect.

Table 3: Grammatical aspect of gerund periphrasis in Puerto Rico

Imperfect Aorist Perfect Prospective Total

274 19 7 7 307

89.3% 6.2% 2.25 2.25 100%

These findings help us to respond to our first research question, namely:

What grammatical aspect appears with gerundive periphrasis in puertocruceño Spanish?

The data indicate that gerundive periphrasis of puertocruceño Spanish appears with imperfect

aspect, that is, an event without specified beginning or end. Moreover, the data permit us to

conclude that the distribution of the gerund is conditioned by aspectual value, both grammatical

aspect and, as we will see in the next section, lexical aspect as well.

5.2 Lexical aspect

In puertocruceño Spanish periphrastic constructions in gerundive form denote dynamic predicates

in 88% of the cases (Table 4), and most often these predicates are atelic (53.2%), that is to say,

they lack a specified end.

Table 4: Lexical aspect of the periphrastic gerund in Saint Croix

Dynamic Stative Total

193 27 220

88% 12% 100%

These predicates denote a proposition that actually occurs and, while occurring, changes or

progresses with time. Additionally, these dynamic predicates have a limited duration, reflect

external actions, require a voluntary act (Binnick, 1991); and are often differentiated from stative

predicates that expresses a unique state that does not change, that is to say, that persists (e.g., ser,

estar, quedarse, tener, etc.). Miguel (1999: 3012) defines stative predicates in the following

manner:

A state is an event that does not occur but rather happens; and happens homogeneously in

every moment of the time period along which it extends. A state, therefore, is lexically

incapable of expressing a change or progress during the given time period; being as it does

not advance, it cannot be directed towards a limit or reach it. It is limited and consistent

during a time period (in every movement of it), so that it is inherently unbound and

durative: continuous. (English translation by author)

It should not surprise us then that in the data from Saint Croix the periphrastic gerund is used

predominantly with dynamic predicates – i.e., the dynamic predicates are completely compatible

with–ndo, while the stative predicates, in principle, do not allow the use of -ndo. A few examples

are presented here:

(9) Gerund with dynamic predicates

a. Y estoy luchando con él. (03)

‘And I am struggling with him/it.’

b. Se fueron para el NAVY según iban saliendo de la escuela. (09)

‘They left for the NAVY as they were leaving from school.’

c. Yo creo que hemos pagado un precio alto y seguimos pagando un precio alto. (10)

‘I think we have paid a high price and we continue to pay a high price.’

However, despite the general incompatability of–ndo with gerundive verbal morphology, there are

exceptions. Thus, there are stative predicates that can take –ndo via an aspectual coercion process

(see Definition 1 above) which undoes their stative nature, so that they denote movement instead

of denoting a state. Such is the case of stative verbs of perception like ver (to see), oir (to hear), as

well as stative verbs of consciousness like pensar (to think). These verbs that we can call verbs of

inert perception comprise 44.4% of the cases in the data from Saint Croix. A few examples are:

11

(10) Gerund with stative predicates

a. En el 1987 me salí porque no me gustaba lo que estaba viendo. (02)

‘In 1987 I left because I did not like what I was seeing.’

b. Ya estaba sintiendo algo, como que estaba buscando algo que no encontraba. (04)

‘I was already feeling something, as I was looking for something that I was not

finding.’

c. Y cuando regresó de allá siempre estoy añorando. (10)

‘And when he returned from there I am always yearning.’

Some authors like Cortés-Torres (2005) called these items verbs of mental activity. These stative

verbs are therefore susceptible to being aspectually coerced to denote an activity rather than a state.

This process has not only been documented in González Rivera (2005), but also in Spanish

speakers in New Mexico (Torres-Cacoullo, 2000), in Puerto Rican Spanish (Cortés-Torres, 2005),

and in the diachrony of Spanish (González Rivera, 2009). We can conclude that the morphology

of the gerund can be used to undo the stative nature of stative verbs. Even so, the frequency of

gerundive periphrasis with stative verbs is very limited, as the data demonstrate. Torres-Cacoullos

(2000: 212-213) concludes that:

The relevance of the state versus dynamic situation distinction for Spanish has been

questioned by King and Suñer (1980a), who present numerous examples of estar + -ndo

with main verbs classified elsewhere as statives. However, while estar-plus-stative

combinations need not be starred as ungrammatical, there are frequency restrictions on

their use. (cf. Givón, 1979: 22-43).

In the data from Puerto Rican Spanish, the interviewees also prefer dynamic predicates in

periphrastic constructions with –ndo (81%) (Table 5).

Table 5: Lexical aspect of the periphrastic gerund in Puerto Rico

Dynamic Stative Total

248 59 307

81% 19% 100%

This allows us to conclude that –ndo is a morpheme used primarily with dynamic verbal lexemes.

Such a conclusion has also been documented in the diachrony of Spanish: in the diachronic data

that González Rivera (2009) examines, some 89.3% of gerundive periphrases correspond to

dynamic predicates. These findings allow us to answer our second research question, namely:

Which lexical aspect appears with gerundive periphrasis?

According to the data, the predominant lexical aspect in gerundive periphrasis is dynamic and,

predominantly, with atelic predicates. These findings and the findings of the previous section allow

us to answer our third research question:

What is the behavior of the gerund in puertocruceño Spanish in comparison to Puerto Rican

Spanish?

The data show that there is almost no difference between Puerto Rican Spanish and puertocruceño

Spanish in relation to lexical and grammatical aspect. This supports the hypothesis that aspect

determines or restricts the distribution of the gerund and undermines the idea that the non-standard

uses of –ndo in contact situations respond to processes of linguistic transfer or convergence. In

other words, intralingustic variables rather than extralinguistic variables appear to be responsible

for any linguistic change in the behavior of –ndo marked predicates in the varieties examined. We

are not saying that extralinguistic variables do not play an important role in linguistic change, but

rather that linguistic variables appear to play a more important role in natural language

development. This proposal is compatible with Thomason’s (2003:108) assertion that certain

conditions should be satisfied before researchers conclude that external variables are responsible

for linguistic change:

[I]t has to be shown that the language in question has in fact changed, i.e. that the proposed

interference feature is an innovation; that a source language for the interference feature must

be identified in a language that both has the relevant feature (or some other feature from which

the relevant feature can reasonably be supposed to have derived) and that the proposed source

language had the feature before the period of contact; and, to be fully convincing, the claim

should be supported by solid evidence of other interference features from the same source

language.

In summary, the data from Saint Croix and from Puerto Rico support the hypothesis that the use

of the morpheme –ndo in periphrastic constructions for the most part conveys an imperfect

aspectual meaning and appears with atelic and dynamic predicates. Finally, Saint Croix provides

us with an appropriate context to research Spanish, not only because there is a significant

community of puertocruceños living on the island, but also because a substantial group of

Dominicans have immigrated to the island in recent years. Future research on this community will

allow us to understand if they are adopting puertocruceño Spanish or their Spanish preserves the

grammatical properties of Dominican Spanish (e.g., the expletive ello). No comprehensive

understanding of contemporary Caribbean Spanish is possible without considering the varieties

spoken in St. Croix.

13

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