The East L.A. accent

[Laurence Horn]

On Oct 25, 2011, at 11:25 AM, Nancy Friedman wrote:

> Article in today's L.A. Times about "Chicano English" and about Pitzer
> College linguistics professor Carmen Fought, who studies it.
>
>
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-eastla-accent-20111025,0,987605.stor
> y
>
> ...
>>> The word "barely" is often used to indicate that something just happened,
> as in: "I barely got out of the hospital."<<
>
>
>
> (Could that "barely" come from the Spanish verb acabar-"to just finish"?)
>
A colleague, Scott Schwenter, who specializes in Spanish and linguistic variation and has also worked a lot on approximatives (= 'almost'/"casi", 'barely'/"apenas") cross-linguistically, writes:
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That definitely comes from the (mainly Northern? and rural?) Mexican use of 'apenas' ('barely') which is used in temporal contexts in much the same way: "Apenas llegué"  = lit. I barely arrived = 'I just got here'. I don't think 'acabar de' + Inf has that interpretation.
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LH

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