Siempre and todo el tiempo: Investigating semantic convergence in a bilingual dialect

Bilingual dialects of Spanish in the U.S. tend to accelerate language chang e arising from variability already present in ono-contact dialects. In San Antonio, Texas, variability between todo el tiempo and siempre suggest that the former has converged with the latter semantically. in the following ex ample, the periphrastic form is used synonymously with siempre: Yo todo el tiempo les digo a mis chamacos....146 occurrences from an 18 speaker sample allow for quantitative and qualitative examination of the data. Results fr om variable rule analysis show generation to be most predictive social fact or for todo el tiempo. Reasons for its increased used by the third and four th generations are suggested to include the erosion of semantic constraints , the greater semantic transparency of the periphrastic expression, the adv antage of exploiting limited lexical resources, and ongoing language shift to English.