Cross-Linguistic Influence in Spanish in Contact with French in Montreal

This paper, positioned within the study of immigrant language varieties in Canada, examines mismo si (‘even if’), an understudied grammatical feature of Spanish in contact with French in Montreal. The phenomenon is analyzed cross-linguistically and within the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology, approaching it from two complementary perspectives: (1) a sociolinguistic analysis of Spanish-French bilinguals in Montreal, and (2) a formal investigation of its structural properties. Mismo si, equivalent to Standard Spanish aunque and incluso si (‘even though’), is a lexical transfer from the French conjunction même si and conveys a concessive meaning. The evidence shows that this structure constitutes a distinctive linguistic adaptation to the bilingual sociolinguistic environment of Montreal. The article is organized in two sections: the first presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of mismo si occurrences in the COLEM corpus (Corpus Oral de la Lengua Española en Montreal), while the second offers a formal examination of this contact-induced structure.