Multilingual Past-Tense Constructions in Spanish–Italian Language Contact: A Diasystematic Construction Grammar Perspective

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of multilingual past-tense constructions produced by Italian–Peruvian speakers in Turin (Italy). Drawing on data from the Stra-ParlaTO corpus, the study aims both to describe the multilingual practices of this community and to assess the explanatory potential of Diasystematic Construction Grammar for language-contact phenomena. After reviewing code-mixing, translanguaging, and second-language acquisition approaches, the paper argues that these frameworks converge in recognising the role of structural similarity in the emergence of hybrid productions, but leave underspecified the nature of the abstract linguistic knowledge that makes them possible. The analysis shows that speakers generalise across Italian passato prossimo and Spanish pretérito perfecto compuesto, developing an abstract language-unspecific construction that licenses both monolingual and mixed realisations. These findings suggest that Diasystematic Construction Grammar provides a cognitively plausible account of multilingual constructions and can be fruitfully extended to recent migration settings.