"Subject pronoun expression in oral Mexican Spanish" (Yolanda Lastra & Pedro Martín Butragueño, in Subject pronoun expression in Spanish. A Cross-Dialectal Perspective. Ed. Ana M. Carvalho, Rafael Orozco & Naomi Lapidus Shin. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015, pp. 39-57. (original) (raw)
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The analysis focuses on the expression of subject pronouns in oral Mexican Spanish, emphasizing the presence and absence of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) within various contexts, dialects, and speaker demographics. Building on previous studies, it explores theoretical frameworks, particularly relating to ambiguity and functional compensation hypotheses, while presenting empirical data derived from a sample of Mexican speakers. The findings highlight linguistic tendencies and contribute to understanding dialectical variations in SPP usage.
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Spanish in Context, 2020
The objective of this article is to extract certain general consequences about social and linguistic-pragmatic conditions in the expression of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) in contemporary urban Spanish. The study examines some of the results obtained in Valencia and Granada, Spain; Mexico City, Mexico; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Caracas, Venezuela; Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia; and Montevideo, Uruguay. These works have all analyzed data from the “Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish in Spain and America” (PRESEEA), thus they all share data collected under very similar circumstances (Moreno Fernández 1996; Cestero Mancera 2012). The presence or the absence of pronominal subjects in Spanish is required in certain contexts, but in most cases they are considered optional. This optionality depends on fixed factors of linguistic nature (such as the grammatical person and number of the subject, or the co-reference between the subject and a previous element) and of social nature (such as age or gender), and on random factors (such as individuals and verbal pieces). The hypotheses to be tested are: (a) there is geographical variation among the cities studied, which is reflected in the rates of overt SPPs (Otheguy & Zentella 2012; Carvalho, Orozco & Shin 2015); (b) social variation is relatively small within each city; (c) the fixed and random linguistic-pragmatic variation is intense within each city and similar among cities; (d) the most relevant factors that activate overt SPPs are related to adequate information management of the anaphoric chains and textual coherence.
Identity effects in Uruguayan Spanish
This paper describes a case of paradigm leveling recently attested in the present subjunctive of a Spanish dialect spoken in Uruguay. With the aim of shedding some light on the type/nature of identity effects in inflectional paradigms, the paper explores the phonological representations and properties found in the leveled paradigm. Additionally, it reviews some of the shortcomings of models that place most of the burden of explanation for analogical changes on the phonological grammar. In contrast to such models, this paper suggests that the difference between the innovative dialect and standard dialects without leveling does not rely on their phonology, but rather in the choice of a morphological exponent.
Earlier work on existential agreement variation in British English and Caribbean Spanish has made a convincing case for the hypothesis that existential agreement variation is constrained by three domain-general cognitive constraints on language (production) that are assumed in Cognitive Linguistics: markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming. A corollary of this analysis is that the same constraints should also be able to account for the behavior of other morphosyntactic alternations. To explore this hypothesis, I perform a case study of a well known, but notoriously hard to model alternation: subject pronoun expression in Cuban Spanish. I propose that the variation between overt and omitted tacit amounts to a competition between two abstract constructions: and , which is constrained by the three domain-general cognitive constraints. The database consists of 7,849 conjugated verbs with human-reference subjects that were drawn from 24 sociolinguistic interviews with native speakers of Cuban Spanish residing in Havana, Cuba. The results of a mixed-effects logistic regression suggest that speakers prefer for conceptually more prominent subjects, for verb forms that are entrenched in this construction, and when they have just used or processed this construction. As this pattern coincides completely with the predictions that follow from markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming, the paper concludes that morphosyntactic variation is constrained by these domain-general cognitive constraints.
The book The Afro-Bolivian Spanish Determiner Phrase. A Microparametric Account is an ambitious project whose ultimate goal is to raise awareness of the understudied, and highly stigmatized, Afro-Hispanic contact varieties spoken in Latin America, namely the so-called Afro-Bolivian Spanish vernacular (ABS henceforth) spoken in the region of Los Yungas, Department of La Paz, Bolivia. The book opens a new series (Theoretical Developments in Hispanic Linguistics, Series Editor: Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach), which aims at addressing current grammatical, historical, acquisitional and/or computational topics in Hispanic Linguistics. The series attaches special importance to describing various dialects of Spanish and integrating diverse theoretical perspectives in the explanation of the linguistic facts described. The book's three main objectives fit perfectly within the goals of the series. On the one hand, from a formal linguistic point of view, it describes in detail the core morphosyntactic properties of the ABS Determiner Phrase with respect to the behavior of bare nouns, nominal ellipsis and gender/number agreement. The fact that ABS lacks normalization forces the author to set up the basic data paradigms with respect to the facts under scrutiny. Offering these new sets of data to the linguistic community is, per se, a priceless asset of the book. Moreover, it provides a microparametric theoretical explanation, framed in a generative-oriented perspective, of the differences found between ABS and Standard Spanish with respect to the aforementioned phenomena as well as the variation regarding gender/number agreement which can be found within this vernacular. On the other hand, the book endeavors to characterize the ABS dialect from a sociolinguistic point of view, specifically analyzing in detail the synchronic sociolinguistic distribution of the intra-dialect variation related to gender/number agreement mentioned in the previous paragraph. This offers an enriched and multifaceted description of the linguistic phenomena studied in the book, focusing not only on their formal properties but also on their distribution across social groups. Finally, the book compares and evaluates different theories about the historical origins of ABS, calling into question its creole origin. In order to achieve this goal, the book explores the socio-historical development of this dialect. The combination of these three perspectives –formal/microparametric, sociolinguistic and historical– which also implies the use of different methodologies, is not frequent in the literature; these features make the book an invaluable contribution to the linguistic field. The book is structured as follows. After a short introductory chapter, where the general goals and main assumptions of the book are set out, chapter 2 discusses the supposed creole origin of ABS, analyzing both the sociohistorical development of this vernacular and also the main linguistic data that can be used to argue for or against that hypothesis.
Perseveration of subject expression across regional dialects of Spanish
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Models of communication strictly as a function of intention and control founder when confronted by variationist findings of perseveration at different levels of linguistic structure in use. When Poplack (1981) finds that Spanish [s] leads to more [s] and that “zeros lead to zeros,” it is unclear how speaker intention is involved. But, it is clear that what a speaker says at one point will influence what this same speaker says next. Here we identify perseveration of pronominal and null subjects in three dialects of Spanish: Madrid, San Juan, and New York City. In null subject Spanish, expression of subject pronouns leads to more pronouns, and expression of null subjects leads to more nulls. We argue that a perspicuous account of perseveration may be found within Spreading-Activation Theory (Dell 1986), a psycholinguistic theory of production based on speech errors. Thus, this work integrates quantitative dialect description with psycholinguistic explanation.
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