Continuity and innovation in Peruvian Spanish: pragmatics and contact in (differential ) object marking (original) (raw)
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Linguistic Advances in Central American Spanish. Leiden/Boston: Brill Publishers., 2023
The goal of this chapter was to analyze two grammatical changes observed during a spoken corpus event conducted in Guatemala in 2001 in San Pedro Cutzán, Chicacao (Suchitepéquez), Guatemala. The corpus consists of 24 interviews of 30-60 minutes in length, which are carried out with 12 Tz’utujil-Spanish bilinguals and 12 monolinguals in Spanish informants. One such change affects to the unstressed third-person pronominal system, in itself characterized by two phenomena. First is the use of lo as the only third-person direct object pronoun, that is, as an invariable morph (si es posible deja tirado la tinaja y lo quiebra). 657 cases of lo are registered vs. 191 los, la, las. Equally noted was the omission of the same, that is, the production of a zero morph (la candelai también Øi usaron los antepasados). 171 omissions vs. 753 pronouns are taken into account. A reorganization of the paradigm and the generalization of an invariant lo and a phonetic zero for the marking of the direct object is observed in bilinguals, however in monolinguals is an incipient change. The second grammatical change was the use en instead of a as prepositional regimen of verbs of movement (si yo voy en la escuela uno no puede hablar en Tz’utujil), 16 cases are analyzed, prevails in instrumental bilinguals (57%) and is spreading to the rest of bilinguals (21%) but not to monolinguals for the moment. Both phenomena are considered contact-induced changes (Palacios, 2013), and the hypothesis of perceived similarities (Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008) is put forward as the mechanism of the changes described in Spanish.
2017
The null object/overt pronoun split in Brazilian Portuguese has been assimilated to differential object marking in some functionalist accounts (Schwenter and Silva 2002, Schwenter 2006). This paper examines further arguments for this connection; we evaluate a battery of more formal diagnostics under which the Brazilian Portuguese data pattern similarly to canonical instances of prepositional marking across Romance (Romanian, Spanish etc.). The application of other tests weakens the assumption of a unique licensing position for differentially marked objects in Romance languages.
Phenomenology and The Cognitive Sciences, 2015
The principal aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between intersubjectivity and grammar. We argue that intersubjectivity represents, on the one hand, a prerequisite for the development of language as a symbolic system, and therefore also for the development of grammar. Furthermore, we attempt to show that language, and especially grammar, codify intersubjectivity. That is to say, grammatical constructions represent the intersubjective interactions that situated agents maintain in different pragmatic contects. We call this phenomenon the meta-representational capacity of language. Our main object of analysis is the development of the ditransitive construction (give something to someone-dar algo a alguien) in the Spanish language. The evolution of this construction makes it clear that there is an important correlation between the degree of complexity of the codified intersubjective interaction and grammatically obligatory nature and the prominence of the grammatical construction that codifies it: the greater the complexity, the greater its obligatoriness, and vice versa.
Object Person Marking in two under-represented Spanish Dialects of Mexico
Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 2023
This paper is about a clitic-like form lo that appears in two under-studied dialects of Mexico in the context of transitive clauses. The distribution of this clitic-like form in these dialects is at odds with Standard Mexican Spanish which does not allow it in the same context. This clitic-like form resembles the singular, masculine, accusative object clitic of Standard Spanish, but it differs in that it does not show the agreement pattern expected for object clitics. In this paper we argue that this clitic-like form is better understood as an object marker that is triggered by the lack of a positive [Participant] feature in the direct object as part of the extended projection of the Object-DP. We also propose that this marking strategy is not the result of linguistic transfer or interaction with a different language, but rather a possible development Isogloss 2023, 9(2)/5 Renato García-González & Fernando Chapa-Barrios 2 within the grammar of Spanish. This marking strategy is, in fact, an inherent strategy of Spanish, but it gets blocked by normative pressure. The fact that this strategy flourishes in dialects apart from normative/academic contexts could be an indicator that the explanation we offer is on the right track.
The Routledge Handbook of Variationist Approaches to Spanish, 2021
The comparative sociolinguistic analysis adopted in this study enables us to compare the present stage of language with previous periods in history regarding a variation still active in the syntax of prepositional relative clauses in Spanish (el pueblo en (el) que nací ‘the town in which I was born’). The analysis of seven oral corpora of Peninsular Spanish shows that the art + que variant is by far the most frequent in such sentences, although the alternative form (Ø + que), much more common in the past, is still widely used. The comparative analysis with past times reveals that this change has been constrained by a complex mixture of linguistic and extralinguistic factor groups. Some show strong persistence over time, but others offer some signs of generalization and even change in the direction of the effect, both in the inner grammar and on the sociolectal axis.