Topic Fronting in Spanish and English Codeswitching: A Cross-Community Perspective

Abstract

This pilot study examines how topic preposing interacts with codeswitching in Spanish-English bilingual speech in Puerto Rico and Gibraltar, two communities with markedly different sociolinguistic profiles. In Puerto Rico, Spanish remains the dominant language of everyday life, while English occupies a socially stratified institutional role and bilingual proficiency is unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups. Gibraltar, conversely, exhibits a long-term, intergenerational shift toward English dominance, with Spanish functioning largely as a heritage language and the locally rooted contact variety Llanito extending beyond spontaneous codeswitching. Using written acceptability judgments, the study compares English-style topic preposing and Spanish-style Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) across clauses where Spanish or English provides the structural frame. Results show greater acceptability for topic preposing in Spanish-framed clauses and reduced acceptability in English-embedded contexts, reflecting known syntactic constraints. Crucially, however, bilinguals in both communities exhibit a degree of structural alignment, producing intermediate acceptability ratings in codeswitched utterances. These findings highlight the combined influence of matrix language selection and sociolinguistic context on topic-fronting strategies in bilingual speech. The data suggest that despite divergent histories of language contact, dominance, and prestige, bilingual speakers deploy a shared, highly adaptive discourse strategy that bridges the cognitive demands of the syntax-information structure interface.