Subject Expression in a Southeastern U.S. Mexican Community (original) (raw)

This dissertation examines language contact between Spanish and English in the Southeastern U.S. by analyzing Spanish spoken in Georgia. Through an analysis of immigrant Spanish in the city of Roswell, an exurb of Atlanta, potential contact-induced language change is investigated through the lens of subject expression. While most research on Spanish has been carried out in regions such as the Southwest and Northeast, the Southeastern U.S. has not received as much scholarly attention. Therefore, the present investigation seeks to examine understudied varieties of U.S. Spanish, specifically regarding the linguistic processes at work in recent language contact situations. Latin American immigration to the Southeast has led to recent demographic shift in this region and substantial Spanish-speaking populations are emerging that historically were not part of the Southeast. The city of Roswell in particular represents this demographic shift in the Southeast, making it an ideal test site for emerging bilingual speech communities. The current study examines subject expression among 20 Mexican immigrants using sociolinguistic interview data. The speakers' average length of residency (LOR) in the U.S. is 12 years, and their average age of arrival (AOA) is 27. Tokens of subject pronouns from the interviews were coded for language-internal (linguistic) variables previously shown to constrain subject expression (e.g. person/number, switch reference, tense-mood-aspect [TMA]), morphological ambiguity, polarity, specificity) as well as language-external (social) variables (e.g. English proficiency, age, gender, LOR, AOA), and then analyzed using mixed-effects multivariate analysis in Rbrul (Johnson 2009). Results indicate an overall overt pronoun rate of 27% for Mexicans in Roswell, which is higher than what has been reported for monolingual Mexican Spanish. The multivariate analysis showed that several linguistic variables (e.g. person/number, switch reference, morphological ambiguity, polarity) and one social variable (age) played a significant role in pronoun variation. Moreover, differential effects were revealed when compared to monolingual Mexican Spanish for variables such as TMA and verb class, suggesting an influence of bilingualism. Such divergent linguistic configurations in Roswell Spanish suggest that we are seeing an emergent variety of Mexican Spanish in the U.S. with regard to subject pronoun expression.