Gramáticas en contacto en un corpus bilingüe

It is widely held that language contact leads to grammatical convergence. The evidence for this, however, remains scant. To verify that language change has occurred and that it is due to contact, two requirements must be met, one social —to demonstrate that the change has become a regular pattern in a speech community— and one linguistic —to distinguish external influence from internal linguistic tendencies. These twin requirements are met by a bilingual corpus that permits contextualization of linguistic forms with respect to both the speech community and the grammatical system. This article describes the construction of a bilingual corpus with each contact language represented to apply a convergence criterion based on patterns of internal variation between alternative morphosyntactic forms, as compared across bilingual varieties and monolingual benchmarks. We illustrate with Spanish in contact with English in an established bilingual community.