Rafael E Orozco | Louisiana State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Rafael E Orozco
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, May 5, 2022
The verb is a known constraint on subject pronoun expression (SPE) that has been explored using s... more The verb is a known constraint on subject pronoun expression (SPE) that has been explored using several different predictor/factor configurations. This paper expands on recent investigations of how verbs condition SPE by analyzing 17,500 tokens from five locales: Barranquilla, Cali, Medellín, New York, and Xalapa. We hypothesized that verb groups do not constitute natural functional SPE constraining categories. We analyze the effect of the verb with multivariate regressions testing-as random effects factors-verbs and pronominal subject +verb collocations. Results uncover-within each corpus-significant opposite tendencies between (a) verbs in the same category and (b) finite forms of a single verb. Findings support our hypothesis revealing that pronominal subject + verb collocations provide a more definitive account of how verbs condition SPE. Findings also suggest that pragmatic/ cognitive dynamics govern verb effects on SPE and provide mounting evidence that despite four decades of research, we have not found the real effects of the verb on SPE. This research expands our analytical scope and improves the accountability of findings on SPE by offering new perspectives on the lexical effect of the verb.
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America
The verb is a known constraint on subject pronoun expression that has been explored using several... more The verb is a known constraint on subject pronoun expression that has been explored using several different predictor/factor configurations. This paper expands on recent investigations of how verbs condition this phenomenom by analyzing 17,500 tokens from five locales: Barranquilla, Cali, Medellín, New York, and Xalapa. We hypothesized that verb groups do not constitute natural functional subject pronoun constraining categories. We analyze the effect of the verb with multivariate regressions testing – as random effects factors – verbs and pronominal subject+verb collocations. Results uncover – within each corpus – significant opposite tendencies between (a) verbs in the same category and (b) finite forms of a single verb. Findings support our hypothesis revealing that pronominal subject+verb collocations provide a more definitive account of how verbs condition subject pronoun expression. Findings also suggest that pragmatic/cognitive dynamics govern verb effects and provide mounting...
Colombian Varieties of Spanish, 2012
Colombian Varieties of Spanish, 2012
Colombian Varieties of Spanish, 2012
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 2018
Resumen Este estudio de la expresión de pronombres personales de sujeto entre hablantes del caste... more Resumen Este estudio de la expresión de pronombres personales de sujeto entre hablantes del castellano caribeño colombiano en Nueva York revela una tasa pronominal (43 %) significativamente más alta que la existente en el Caribe colombiano. Los resultados descubren que cinco predictores lingüísticos y dos sociales condicionan la expresión pronominal. Los predictores lingüísticos – entre los cuales persona y número del sujeto condiciona más fuertemente el uso pronominal – revelan tendencias similares a las existentes alrededor del mundo hispánico. Los predictores sociales reflejan aumentos significativos en las tasas pronominales tanto de mujeres como de hombres en los diferentes grupos etarios analizados y también entre los recién llegados a Nueva York. Aunque existen similitudes superficiales con el resto del mundo en los efectos condicionantes internos, un análisis minucioso de los efectos del verbo descubre tendencias opuestas entre verbos agrupados en una misma categoría semánti...
IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society, 2018
This volume fills a void in language variation and change research. It is the first to provide an... more This volume fills a void in language variation and change research. It is the first to provide an empirical, comparative study of Spanish in Colombia and New York City. Remarkable similarities in the linguistic conditioning on language variation in both communities contrast with interesting differences in the effects of social predictors. The book provides a window into the effects of language and dialect contact on change and serves as a model for studies comparing diasporic populations to their home speech communities.
Hispania, 2017
o el mismo Lazarillo de Tormes" (229). Si bien podría argüirse que se trata solo de ejemplos, no ... more o el mismo Lazarillo de Tormes" (229). Si bien podría argüirse que se trata solo de ejemplos, no deja de llamar la atención la exclusión de autores latinoamericanos en esta cita, así como en el resto del ensayo, a excepción de Mario Benedetti o Mariano Azuela. Pese a afirmar Sanz, más adelante, que "no solo se defiende el interés de los textos literarios en el aula de ELE, sino también su inclusión, entre esas obras, de textos de autores procedentes de Latinoamérica" (237), la práctica omisión de ejemplos de escritores latinoamericanos, frente a la amplia nómina de literatos españoles que se citan en el texto contrasta parcialmente con la complejidad y diversidad de la que, con mucho acierto, hablaba Ferrús. Una singularidad del libro es que hace patentes nuevas realidades que afectan a la práctica docente, como el perfil cada vez más heterogéneo de los estudiantes de ELE/EL2 en las universidades españolas, la creciente presencia de alumnado sinohablante y japonés, o el uso de las nuevas tecnologías (p. ej., aplicaciones móviles para la práctica de la pronunciación) y de las redes sociales en el aula. Todos estos aspectos-y muchos otros que se abordan en el volumen-nos permiten ser cada vez más conscientes, por un lado, de los cambios a los que nos enfrentamos como docentes de una lengua en expansión que no solo cuenta cada vez con un número mayor de hablantes nativos, sino también de aprendientes y, por otro, de la necesidad de abrir nuevas líneas de investigación que arrojen luz sobre los diferentes fenómenos a los que, desde la práctica docente, debemos dar respuesta. En todo caso, es de celebrar la publicación de obras como el presente volumen no solo por los valiosos datos que aportan al lector, sino también porque son un reflejo de que el nuestro es un campo multidisciplinar y en auge donde todavía quedan muchos caminos por explorar.
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2016
This study is the first variationist analysis of subject personal pronoun expression (SPE) in the... more This study is the first variationist analysis of subject personal pronoun expression (SPE) in the Spanish of Xalapa, Mexico. The overall pronominal rate (25%)—the highest such rate found in Mexican Spanish so far—also constitutes one of the highest in a mainland Spanish variety. Six predictors—four internal and two external—significantly condition SPE. The internal conditioning—congruent with what occurs elsewhere—reveals grammatical number and person of the subject as the strongest predictor. It also shows that verb class has tendencies similar to those found in other communities. However, further analysis uncovers that lexical frequency provides more definite answers regarding how verbs condition SPE, as within the copulative verb class category ser ‘be’ favors overt subjects but estar ‘be’ favors null subjects. Moreover, the unusually robust effect of age sets Xalapa Spanish apart from most other varieties. Interestingly, the pronominal rate among teenagers (11%)—below the lowest...
Revista Internacional De Linguistica Iberoamericana, 2009
Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 2004. Microfiche. s
This study analyzes the social constraints conditioning the expression of nominal possession in B... more This study analyzes the social constraints conditioning the expression of nominal possession in Barranquilla, Colombia and the New York Colombian community. Data obtained from interviews with forty speakers from middle and working class extraction were used to conduct a series of statistical regression analyses. The findings revealed that the possessive is conditioned by six constraints. Although age and sex are significant in both communities, the effect of sex is not the same in both populations. Education, length of residence, and age of arrival in the U.S. also reached statistical significance suggesting that bilingualism, direct contact with English, and dialect leveling may have an impact in New York. These findings provide an indication of how the combination of language and dialect contact affects the Spanish of New York Colombians. They also help increase our understanding of how the sociolinguistic forces constraining language variation in Colombian Spanish conform to esta...
Spanish in Context, 2010
To express nominal possession, Spanish speakers use a linguistic variable with three variants: a ... more To express nominal possession, Spanish speakers use a linguistic variable with three variants: a possessive adjective, a definite article and periphrasis. This study explores the expression of possession in Barranquilla, Colombia examining data extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with a socially stratified group of twenty informants. I conducted a series of statistical regression analyses for each variant testing ten linguistic and five social constraints. The results revealed that possessive adjectives and definite articles marking possession are almost evenly distributed. The expression of possession is conditioned by eight linguistic and two social constraints including distance between referent and possessive, semantic category, type of subject, speaker’s sex and social status/age. The results also suggest that the incursion of possessive periphrasis may constitute a manifestation of cyclicity, a crosslinguistic evolutionary process triggering internal syntactic and morpho...
Spanish in Context, 2014
This paper revisits the treatment of the expression of futurity in Spanish foreign language (FL) ... more This paper revisits the treatment of the expression of futurity in Spanish foreign language (FL) textbooks. We analyzed twenty college-level Spanish FL textbooks to determine and quantify how futurity is represented. Variationist research has shown the periphrastic future (PF) to be the most frequent variant of futurity followed by the simple present (SP) and the morphological future (MF). Our findings reveal that, despite over two decades of communicative language teaching, Spanish FL textbooks still do not completely present the reality of the expression of futurity. Introductory texts present all three variants of futurity. However, there is a dramatic difference in the formal representation of these three variants in intermediate texts. The PF is formally presented in only four of the ten intermediate texts analyzed. Interestingly, all ten intermediate textbooks include a formal section on the MF. From a formal treatment perspective and unlike native speaker usage, the MF contin...
Spanish in Contact: Policy, social and linguistic …, 2007
... The PF is reported as the preferred expression of futurity in Caribbean Spanish, in Chile (Si... more ... The PF is reported as the preferred expression of futurity in Caribbean Spanish, in Chile (Silva-Corval&n & Terrell 1989), in ... 314 Rafael Orozco van Naersen (1983, 1995), and Zentella (1997b) indicate the preferential use of the periphrastic over the morphological future in all ...
Selected proceedings of the third workshop on Spanish …, 2007
Proceedings of the 7th Hispanic Linguistics …, 2005
and Mercy College 1. Background To express futurity in the indicative mood Spanish speakers choos... more and Mercy College 1. Background To express futurity in the indicative mood Spanish speakers choose from among three interchangeable forms: the morphological future (MF), the simple present tense (SP), and the periphrastic future (PF), illustrated in (1), (2), and (3) respectively. (1) Cantaré mañana. '[I] will sing tomorrow'. (2) Canto mañana. '[I] sing tomorrow'. (3) Voy a cantar mañana. '[I]'m going to sing tomorrow'. The PF is formed by the simple present indicative of ir 'go' + a 'to' + infinitive. It is equivalent to the English periphrastic form to be going to + infinitive. The expression of futurity in Spanish is undergoing a change. Gutiérrez (1995:214) asserts that as part of this change, the PF is favored by Spanish speakers at the expense of the MF. Studies regarding the expression of futurity throughout the Spanish-speaking world report the PF to be the dominant form. Conversely, the use of the MF is reported to have either decreased considerably or disappeared. The earlier studies, qualitative in nature, have been validated by more recent quantitative analyses. The PF is reported as the preferred expression of futurity in
ling.upenn.edu
Spanish is a so-called 'pro-drop' language, in which pronominal subjects are variably p... more Spanish is a so-called 'pro-drop' language, in which pronominal subjects are variably present. This study expands on a previous examination of the variable use of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) in the speech of residents of Barranquilla, the largest city in the ...
Selected Proceedings of the Second Workshop on …, 2008
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, May 5, 2022
The verb is a known constraint on subject pronoun expression (SPE) that has been explored using s... more The verb is a known constraint on subject pronoun expression (SPE) that has been explored using several different predictor/factor configurations. This paper expands on recent investigations of how verbs condition SPE by analyzing 17,500 tokens from five locales: Barranquilla, Cali, Medellín, New York, and Xalapa. We hypothesized that verb groups do not constitute natural functional SPE constraining categories. We analyze the effect of the verb with multivariate regressions testing-as random effects factors-verbs and pronominal subject +verb collocations. Results uncover-within each corpus-significant opposite tendencies between (a) verbs in the same category and (b) finite forms of a single verb. Findings support our hypothesis revealing that pronominal subject + verb collocations provide a more definitive account of how verbs condition SPE. Findings also suggest that pragmatic/ cognitive dynamics govern verb effects on SPE and provide mounting evidence that despite four decades of research, we have not found the real effects of the verb on SPE. This research expands our analytical scope and improves the accountability of findings on SPE by offering new perspectives on the lexical effect of the verb.
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America
The verb is a known constraint on subject pronoun expression that has been explored using several... more The verb is a known constraint on subject pronoun expression that has been explored using several different predictor/factor configurations. This paper expands on recent investigations of how verbs condition this phenomenom by analyzing 17,500 tokens from five locales: Barranquilla, Cali, Medellín, New York, and Xalapa. We hypothesized that verb groups do not constitute natural functional subject pronoun constraining categories. We analyze the effect of the verb with multivariate regressions testing – as random effects factors – verbs and pronominal subject+verb collocations. Results uncover – within each corpus – significant opposite tendencies between (a) verbs in the same category and (b) finite forms of a single verb. Findings support our hypothesis revealing that pronominal subject+verb collocations provide a more definitive account of how verbs condition subject pronoun expression. Findings also suggest that pragmatic/cognitive dynamics govern verb effects and provide mounting...
Colombian Varieties of Spanish, 2012
Colombian Varieties of Spanish, 2012
Colombian Varieties of Spanish, 2012
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 2018
Resumen Este estudio de la expresión de pronombres personales de sujeto entre hablantes del caste... more Resumen Este estudio de la expresión de pronombres personales de sujeto entre hablantes del castellano caribeño colombiano en Nueva York revela una tasa pronominal (43 %) significativamente más alta que la existente en el Caribe colombiano. Los resultados descubren que cinco predictores lingüísticos y dos sociales condicionan la expresión pronominal. Los predictores lingüísticos – entre los cuales persona y número del sujeto condiciona más fuertemente el uso pronominal – revelan tendencias similares a las existentes alrededor del mundo hispánico. Los predictores sociales reflejan aumentos significativos en las tasas pronominales tanto de mujeres como de hombres en los diferentes grupos etarios analizados y también entre los recién llegados a Nueva York. Aunque existen similitudes superficiales con el resto del mundo en los efectos condicionantes internos, un análisis minucioso de los efectos del verbo descubre tendencias opuestas entre verbos agrupados en una misma categoría semánti...
IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society, 2018
This volume fills a void in language variation and change research. It is the first to provide an... more This volume fills a void in language variation and change research. It is the first to provide an empirical, comparative study of Spanish in Colombia and New York City. Remarkable similarities in the linguistic conditioning on language variation in both communities contrast with interesting differences in the effects of social predictors. The book provides a window into the effects of language and dialect contact on change and serves as a model for studies comparing diasporic populations to their home speech communities.
Hispania, 2017
o el mismo Lazarillo de Tormes" (229). Si bien podría argüirse que se trata solo de ejemplos, no ... more o el mismo Lazarillo de Tormes" (229). Si bien podría argüirse que se trata solo de ejemplos, no deja de llamar la atención la exclusión de autores latinoamericanos en esta cita, así como en el resto del ensayo, a excepción de Mario Benedetti o Mariano Azuela. Pese a afirmar Sanz, más adelante, que "no solo se defiende el interés de los textos literarios en el aula de ELE, sino también su inclusión, entre esas obras, de textos de autores procedentes de Latinoamérica" (237), la práctica omisión de ejemplos de escritores latinoamericanos, frente a la amplia nómina de literatos españoles que se citan en el texto contrasta parcialmente con la complejidad y diversidad de la que, con mucho acierto, hablaba Ferrús. Una singularidad del libro es que hace patentes nuevas realidades que afectan a la práctica docente, como el perfil cada vez más heterogéneo de los estudiantes de ELE/EL2 en las universidades españolas, la creciente presencia de alumnado sinohablante y japonés, o el uso de las nuevas tecnologías (p. ej., aplicaciones móviles para la práctica de la pronunciación) y de las redes sociales en el aula. Todos estos aspectos-y muchos otros que se abordan en el volumen-nos permiten ser cada vez más conscientes, por un lado, de los cambios a los que nos enfrentamos como docentes de una lengua en expansión que no solo cuenta cada vez con un número mayor de hablantes nativos, sino también de aprendientes y, por otro, de la necesidad de abrir nuevas líneas de investigación que arrojen luz sobre los diferentes fenómenos a los que, desde la práctica docente, debemos dar respuesta. En todo caso, es de celebrar la publicación de obras como el presente volumen no solo por los valiosos datos que aportan al lector, sino también porque son un reflejo de que el nuestro es un campo multidisciplinar y en auge donde todavía quedan muchos caminos por explorar.
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2016
This study is the first variationist analysis of subject personal pronoun expression (SPE) in the... more This study is the first variationist analysis of subject personal pronoun expression (SPE) in the Spanish of Xalapa, Mexico. The overall pronominal rate (25%)—the highest such rate found in Mexican Spanish so far—also constitutes one of the highest in a mainland Spanish variety. Six predictors—four internal and two external—significantly condition SPE. The internal conditioning—congruent with what occurs elsewhere—reveals grammatical number and person of the subject as the strongest predictor. It also shows that verb class has tendencies similar to those found in other communities. However, further analysis uncovers that lexical frequency provides more definite answers regarding how verbs condition SPE, as within the copulative verb class category ser ‘be’ favors overt subjects but estar ‘be’ favors null subjects. Moreover, the unusually robust effect of age sets Xalapa Spanish apart from most other varieties. Interestingly, the pronominal rate among teenagers (11%)—below the lowest...
Revista Internacional De Linguistica Iberoamericana, 2009
Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 2004. Microfiche. s
This study analyzes the social constraints conditioning the expression of nominal possession in B... more This study analyzes the social constraints conditioning the expression of nominal possession in Barranquilla, Colombia and the New York Colombian community. Data obtained from interviews with forty speakers from middle and working class extraction were used to conduct a series of statistical regression analyses. The findings revealed that the possessive is conditioned by six constraints. Although age and sex are significant in both communities, the effect of sex is not the same in both populations. Education, length of residence, and age of arrival in the U.S. also reached statistical significance suggesting that bilingualism, direct contact with English, and dialect leveling may have an impact in New York. These findings provide an indication of how the combination of language and dialect contact affects the Spanish of New York Colombians. They also help increase our understanding of how the sociolinguistic forces constraining language variation in Colombian Spanish conform to esta...
Spanish in Context, 2010
To express nominal possession, Spanish speakers use a linguistic variable with three variants: a ... more To express nominal possession, Spanish speakers use a linguistic variable with three variants: a possessive adjective, a definite article and periphrasis. This study explores the expression of possession in Barranquilla, Colombia examining data extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with a socially stratified group of twenty informants. I conducted a series of statistical regression analyses for each variant testing ten linguistic and five social constraints. The results revealed that possessive adjectives and definite articles marking possession are almost evenly distributed. The expression of possession is conditioned by eight linguistic and two social constraints including distance between referent and possessive, semantic category, type of subject, speaker’s sex and social status/age. The results also suggest that the incursion of possessive periphrasis may constitute a manifestation of cyclicity, a crosslinguistic evolutionary process triggering internal syntactic and morpho...
Spanish in Context, 2014
This paper revisits the treatment of the expression of futurity in Spanish foreign language (FL) ... more This paper revisits the treatment of the expression of futurity in Spanish foreign language (FL) textbooks. We analyzed twenty college-level Spanish FL textbooks to determine and quantify how futurity is represented. Variationist research has shown the periphrastic future (PF) to be the most frequent variant of futurity followed by the simple present (SP) and the morphological future (MF). Our findings reveal that, despite over two decades of communicative language teaching, Spanish FL textbooks still do not completely present the reality of the expression of futurity. Introductory texts present all three variants of futurity. However, there is a dramatic difference in the formal representation of these three variants in intermediate texts. The PF is formally presented in only four of the ten intermediate texts analyzed. Interestingly, all ten intermediate textbooks include a formal section on the MF. From a formal treatment perspective and unlike native speaker usage, the MF contin...
Spanish in Contact: Policy, social and linguistic …, 2007
... The PF is reported as the preferred expression of futurity in Caribbean Spanish, in Chile (Si... more ... The PF is reported as the preferred expression of futurity in Caribbean Spanish, in Chile (Silva-Corval&n & Terrell 1989), in ... 314 Rafael Orozco van Naersen (1983, 1995), and Zentella (1997b) indicate the preferential use of the periphrastic over the morphological future in all ...
Selected proceedings of the third workshop on Spanish …, 2007
Proceedings of the 7th Hispanic Linguistics …, 2005
and Mercy College 1. Background To express futurity in the indicative mood Spanish speakers choos... more and Mercy College 1. Background To express futurity in the indicative mood Spanish speakers choose from among three interchangeable forms: the morphological future (MF), the simple present tense (SP), and the periphrastic future (PF), illustrated in (1), (2), and (3) respectively. (1) Cantaré mañana. '[I] will sing tomorrow'. (2) Canto mañana. '[I] sing tomorrow'. (3) Voy a cantar mañana. '[I]'m going to sing tomorrow'. The PF is formed by the simple present indicative of ir 'go' + a 'to' + infinitive. It is equivalent to the English periphrastic form to be going to + infinitive. The expression of futurity in Spanish is undergoing a change. Gutiérrez (1995:214) asserts that as part of this change, the PF is favored by Spanish speakers at the expense of the MF. Studies regarding the expression of futurity throughout the Spanish-speaking world report the PF to be the dominant form. Conversely, the use of the MF is reported to have either decreased considerably or disappeared. The earlier studies, qualitative in nature, have been validated by more recent quantitative analyses. The PF is reported as the preferred expression of futurity in
ling.upenn.edu
Spanish is a so-called 'pro-drop' language, in which pronominal subjects are variably p... more Spanish is a so-called 'pro-drop' language, in which pronominal subjects are variably present. This study expands on a previous examination of the variable use of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) in the speech of residents of Barranquilla, the largest city in the ...
Selected Proceedings of the Second Workshop on …, 2008