Spanish signifies third-person possession through prepositional phrases
rather than possessive nouns, as in the following sentence:
- Vivo en la casa de mi madre. (literal translation: I live in the house of my
mother.)
We therefore frequently find students producing sentences of the following
type in CE:
- The car of my brother is red.
- The ring of my financée was expensive.
Because Spanish has a single preposition (en) that corresponds to bothin
andonin English, speakers of CE commonly useinwhere Standard English re-
quireson,as in the following:
- Macarena got in the bus before she realized that she didn’t have no change.
- We got in our bikes and rode down the hill.
Other syntactic influences on Chicano English include topicalization,
dropped inflections, inappropriate use of do-support, droppinghavein perfect
verb forms, and transformation of mass nouns into count nouns. Examples of
these influences are shown in the following sentences:
- My brother, he lives in St. Louis. (topicalization)
- My parents were raise old-fashion. (dropped inflections)
- My father asked me where did I go. (inappropriate do-support)
- I been working every weekend for a month. (droppinghave)
- When we went to the mountains, we saw deers and everything. (mass noun to
count noun)
As indicated earlier, CE is subject to various influences. In the case of
droppedhave,we cannot say that this is the result of Spanish interference;
Spanish forms the perfect verb form withhaberplus the past participle of the
main verb. Thus,I have been working every weekend for a monthwould have a
form essentially identical to the Spanish:
- Yo hube estado trabajando cada finde semana por una mes.
On this account, it seems reasonable to conclude that the droppedhavethat
we find in CE is the influence of nonstandard English dialects.
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