Some verbs are better than others: Semantic restrictions in hacer bilingual compound verbs in Northern Belize, El Paso and New Mexico

Abstract

In multilingual communities, code-switching – alternating between languages within a single utterance – is common, though less frequent in the verbal domain (Myers Scotton & Jake, 2014; Pfaff, 1979). Despite this, Spanish-English bilinguals in some communities produce hacer bilingual compound verbs (BCVs), using the Spanish light verb hacer ‘to do’ alongside an English lexical verb. However, not all English verbs are equally acceptable in this construction (Jenkins, 2003; Fuller Medina, 2005). Prior work has investigated verb type (Balam, 2015; Balam & Prada Pérez, 2016; Vergara Wilson, 2013) and semantic domain (Balam et al., 2025) as a restriction on hacer BCVs, but no study has focused on unaccusativity – a property distinguishing monadic verbs by argument structure: unergative verbs have an external argument, while unaccusative verbs have an internal one. This study assesses unaccusativity using the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (ASH, Sorace, 2000) and examines whether unaccusativity or related semantic factors – telicity, agentivity, subject animacy, aspect – affect the acceptability of English verbs in hacer BCVs in Northern Belize, El Paso, and New Mexico. The methodology used was two-fold: a corpus analysis and an Acceptability Judgement Task. Results show that hacer BCVs are sensitive to unaccusativity, animacy of the subject, and aspectual class to varying degrees, based on community. These patterns suggest hacer may be emerging as an auxiliary, signaling change in bilingual syntax.