The Argument Structure of the Light Verb hacer as a Means for Incorporating English Borrowings Into Peninsular Spanish

Abstract

The present study explores a phenomenon of indirect language contact that shares similar properties with the so-called bilingual complex verbs that bilingual speakers produce spontaneously in code-switching. Hacer el check in ‘to check in’ and hacer ghosting ‘to ghost’ are some of the multi-word units made up of the Spanish light verb hacer ‘to do’/‘to make’ and an Anglicism used in monolingual conversations and press texts in Peninsular Spanish. Still, these hybrid light verb constructions do not reproduce the syntactic pattern of their English counterparts. For example, hacer el check in corresponds to the phrasal verb to check in, while hacer ghosting to the simple verb to ghost. Through a qualitative-inductive method, this research aims to uncover the reasons behind the productivity of this lexical incorporation strategy in the monolingual oral and written discourse of Peninsular Spanish speakers. Additionally, it invites the Spanish-speaking community to reflect on the implications that the integration of unnecessary English borrowings may have on the reconfiguration of the Spanish language.

Keywords

• Light verb constructions
• hacer
• lexical borrowing
• Spanish
• English

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