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Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles
... Específicamente, os verbos em 1ª pessoa do singular y em 3ª do singular tendem a favorecer os pronomes explícitos (p. ex., Silva-Corvalán, 1994;Flores-Ferrán, 2002;Shin, 2012;Lastra;Martín Butragueño, 2015). De fato, a maioria dos estudios têm descoberto que todas as formas singulares en general promovem os SP explícitos. ...
... A mudança de referência, que considera a continuidade vs. a mudança de um sujeito a outro, mostra uma influência forte na ESP para todos os dialetos (p. ex., Bentivoglio, 1987;Cameron, 1994;Silva-Corvalán, 1994;Pease-Álvarez, 1997;Travis, 2005;Prada Pérez, 2009;Torres Cacoullos;Travis, 2010;Child, 2011;Zentella, 2012;Michnowicz, 2015;. Específicamente, quando há uma mudança no referente de um sujeito, é mais provável que o SP seja explícito, como visto com yo em (2); quando não há nenhuma mudança , se preferem os SP nulos, como em (3). ...
... ex. Bentivoglio, 1987;Silva-Corvalán, 1994;Travis, 2007;Zentella, 2012;. Em geral, foi demonstrado que verbos psicológicos/mentais (p. ...
RESUMO: Um fator que geralmente é negligenciado nos estudos sobre a variação dos sujeitos nulos e explícitos no espanhol é o turno de fala; isto é, se a produção ocorre dentro do mesmo turno de fala ou no início de um novo turno de fala na interação conversacional. A presente investigação pretende explorar este fator usando 20 falantes de um corpus do espanhol mexicano falado na área metropolitana de Atlanta (Nome do corpus [Autor, Ano]) para descobrir seu significado potencial para a variação dos pronomes, sua importância relativa comparada com outros fatores bem estabelecidos e altamente preditivos (pessoa/número, mudança de referência), suas interseções com outros preditores linguísticos e as funções pragmáticas associadas com o uso dos pronomes nos ambientes de início de turno de fala. Os resultados indicam que o turno de fala é um preditor significativo para a variação pronominal, especialmente para o expressão dos sujeitos de 1ª pessoa do singular e 1ª pessoa do plural. Sua importância relativa é impressionante, superando os efeitos de ambiguidade morfológica e classe verbal enquanto também exibindo interações significativas com outros preditores. Os resultados deste estudo reforçam a ideia que o turno de fala deve continuar a ser investigado em estudos futuros, considerando a naturaleza interacional da conversação em vez de focar somente nos sujeitos no meio dos turnos de fala. Os efeitos potenciais dos falantes individuais no conjunto de dados (os casos atípicos) também discutem-se.
... This way of marking distance is less frequent among the monolinguals; however, it is common in other languages (e.g., Jungbluth & Da Milano, 2015). This strategy also mirrors diachronic changes that have occurred in numerous languages (e.g., Lander, 2021) and thus supports arguments that bilingualism may accelerate or enhance ongoing language-internal changes (e.g., Silva-Corvalán, 1986, 1994. ...
... Lander (2021, p. 9) describes the pathway as follows: "When the deictic force of a demonstrative is felt by speakers to be too weak, a particle (e.g., adverb) can be added, which in turn gets weakened over time, necessitating reinforcement once again." This common pathway of change is important to keep in mind when interpreting findings that point to bilinguals diverging from monolinguals in their use of nominal demonstratives (see Section 2.3), especially since bilinguals may sometimes lead or accelerate language change (Heine & Kuteva, 2005;Joseph, 2022;Kupisch & Polinsky, 2022;Silva-Corvalán, 1986, 1994. ...
... If this is the case, this finding aligns with the assertion that heritage speakers (Kupisch & Polinsky, 2022) and bilinguals in general can accelerate or enhance language change (Heine & Kuteva, 2005;Joseph, 2022). For example, Silva-Corvalán (1986, 1994 found that U.S. Spanish-English bilinguals extended the use of the copula verb estar at the expense of copula verb ser and that this was an internally motivated language change that was accelerated by language contact. In the present study, the bilinguals' [DEM. ...
This study investigates linguistic convergence in Spanish–English bilinguals’ demonstrative use in English ( this/that ) and Spanish ( este/ese ). Participants completed a task that tested the influence of speaker-referent distance on demonstrative use. Study 1 includes Spanish-speaking monolinguals in Mexico, English-speaking monolinguals in the USA, and Spanish–English bilinguals who were born in the USA or arrived at a young age. Results show that speaker-referent distance constrained all groups’ demonstrative use; however, this effect was weaker in the bilinguals’ Spanish as compared to the Spanish-speaking monolinguals. Study 2 focuses on the bilinguals’ demonstratives. Group-level and individual analyses present evidence for linguistic convergence: the bilinguals’ usage patterns were similar across their languages. Additionally, language dominance predicted usage patterns: the more English-dominant the participant, the greater the likelihood of producing proximal demonstratives for near and far referents alike. This pattern mirrors common diachronic changes, supporting the view that bilinguals may propel language change.
... Although many multilingual situations give rise to heritage language acquisition, in this article, I exclusively discuss heritage languages in the context of immigration, as spoken in the diaspora. If heritage speakers were born into the majority language environment, or arrived very early in childhood, they are typically referred to as second-generation immigrants (Silva-Corvalán, 1994). The parents of heritage speakers are first-generation immigrants, native speakers of standard and nonstandard languages who grew up in their homeland (in monolingual or multilingual environments) and immigrated in adulthood. ...
... By age 4 monolingual Spanish speakers have acquired the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of the two copulas (Requena, 2021). Adult heritage speakers of Spanish have been shown to extend estar to uses of ser (Silva- Corvalán, 1994;Geeslin & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2008), and the two Spanish-English bilingual children followed longitudinally by Silva-Corvalán (2014) from ages 1;00 to 6;00 also showed extensions of estar to ser contexts. Requena and Dracos (2021) investigated the effects of age, language exposure/use, and proficiency on copula selection. ...
... All these studies point to the conclusion that simplification in the children's grammars most likely arises by how their internal grammars process and make do with insufficient input in the heritage language and cross-linguistic influence from the societal majority language before the closure of the critical period, when their native language representations are still nimble and malleable. 5 Finally, Requena and Dracos (2021) also suggest that lowproficiency second-generation children are a catalyzing locus of accelerated language change observed by Silva-Corvalán (1994). Because there are a few reported cases of first-generation immigrants displaying some of the same patterns as second-generation immigrants (heritage speakers) Montrul, 2016aMontrul, , 2022Pascual y Cabo, 2020), I suggest that attrition in the first generation of adults who have children may arise through reverse language transmission. ...
It has been suggested that the parents of heritage speakers (2nd generation immigrants), who are the main source of input to them, may exhibit first-language (L1) attrition in their language, thereby directly transmitting different structural properties or “errors” to the heritage speakers. Given the state of current knowledge of inconsistent input in L1 acquisition, age of acquisition effects in bilingualism, and how long it takes children to master different properties of their native language, it is highly unlikely that immigrant parents are directly transmitting patterns of language attrition to their heritage language children. The argument advanced in this article is that if the patterns evident in heritage speakers and first-generation immigrants are related, reverse transmission may be at play instead, when the heritage speakers might be influencing the language of the parents rather than the other way around. Theoretical and empirical evidence for this proposal may explain the emergence of the variety of Spanish spoken in the United States.
... En este estudio, los hablantes la favorecieron también (70%). Hay que recordar que este estudio se enfoca en solo dos tipos de clíticos, mientras que otros trabajos suelen incluirlos todos (Davies 1995;Thomopoulos Thomas 2012;Silva-Corvalán 1994). Sin embargo, ya que se ha propuesto que los reflexivos favorecen la enclisis por razones semánticas (Gutiérrez 2005), se esperaba que al limitar los clíticos a reflexivos/recíprocos y acusativos, la tasa de enclisis fuera más alta que en la mayoría de los estudios. ...
... Los resultados fueron inesperados, dado que Silva-Corvalán (1994) argumenta que los hablantes bilingües favorecerán la tendencia proclítica incluso más que los monolingües, y eso fue lo que encontró Thomopoulos Thomas (2012) también. Según Silva-Corvalán (1994), las generaciones 2 y 3 emplearon la subida del clítico más que la primera generación. En el presente estudio, a medida que pasan las generaciones, la tendencia proclítica, que tiene una motivación interna en la lengua castellana, se ha ralentizado. ...
... Los hablantes de herencia en este estudio no usan la opción menos marcada (proclisis) en detrimento de la más marcada. Por eso, no muestran una simplificación en su sistema lingüístico que favorezca la subida del clítico, como postula Silva-Corvalán (1994). ...
Esta investigación estudia la subida opcional de los clíticos de objeto directo y su interacción con varios factores sociales y lingüísticos en las comunidades hispanohablantes de Tejas. Se encontró un efecto significativo del lexema del verbo auxiliar en la posición del clítico. También se descubrió una relación significativa entre la subida del clítico y el hablante. Otros factores, aunque no resultaron significativos cuando se analizan en aislamiento, interactúan entre sí de manera sistemática y significativa. Además, se exploran el rol de la generación de los hablantes, el sexo, y el tipo del clítico (reflexivo/recíproco, acusativo).
... Our selection of subject forms as the object of study is based in large part on the wealth of research available on their variable use. Collectively, sociolinguistic studies show that variation between null subjects and overt subject pronouns (SPs) is constrained by factors such as person/number, verbal tense, mood, and aspect (TMA), reflexivity of the verb, lexical content of the verb, and specificity of the referent as well as by discourse-related factors beyond the verb phrase, such as perseveration, discourse genre, referent cohesiveness and clause type (e.g., Carvalho et al. 2015, Shin & Otheguy 2009, Silva-Corvalán 1994, Travis & Torres Cacoullos 2012. Although there is a tendency to limit the study of subject forms to null and overt SPs, there has recently been expansion to study the patterns that influence the realization of subject forms as full lexical noun phrases (NPs), even in contexts where they have been mentioned previously. ...
... With few exceptions, variationist research on subject expression in Spanish has focused on the variation between null and overt SPs and the analyses are limited to contexts that are determined to permit variation between the two forms . Nonetheless, there are studies that suggest that these two forms are in variation with others, most notably full lexical NPs which have been shown to occur even following an adjacent previous mention of the same subject (Bentivoglio 1993, Dumont 2006, Gudmestad & Geeslin 2022, Gudmestad et al. 2013, Silva-Corvalán 2015. 2 Previous variationist research on subject expression in Spanish has found that variation between null and overt SPs is constrained by morphosyntactic factors such as person/number, tense, mood, and aspect (TMA), lexical frequency and reflexivity of the verb, semantic factors such as lexical content of the verb and specificity of the referent, discourse-level factors such as switch reference 3 , referent cohesiveness, the form of the previous mention of the subject (i.e., perseveration), discourse genre, clause type, as well as some extra-linguistic factors (Ávila-Jiménez 1995, Bayley & Pease-Alvarez 1996, 1997, Bentivoglio 1987, Cameron 1994, 1995, Cameron & Flores-Ferrán 2004, Enríquez 1984, Erker & Guy 2012, Flores-Ferrán 2005, Hochberg 1986, Morales 1986, Otheguy & Zentella 2012, Shin 2006, Shin & Cairns 2009, Shin & Otheguy 2009, Silva-Corvalán 1994, Travis 2007, Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010; inter alia). The discourse-level factors previously mentioned have been found to be crucial in explaining subject expression in Spanish and are the focus of the current study. ...
... Perhaps the most widely studied discourse-level factor is switch reference (Bayley & Pease-Alvarez 1997, Bentivoglio 1987, Cameron 1994, 1995, Cameron & Flores-Ferrán 2004, Erker & Guy 2012, Silva-Corvalán 1994, Shin & Cairns 2009, Shin & Otheguy 2009, Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010, Travis 2007). Contexts where the subject referent is different from the referent of the previous tensed verb are known as "switch reference" while situations where these two referents are the same are known as "same reference". ...
... One of the most debated features of SPE in US Spanish is the overall frequency with which bilinguals express pronouns, specifically if they do so at a higher rate than monolinguals, since in English, pronouns are expressed at nearly categorical rates. There are some studies that show a higher rate (Shin & Otheguy 2005, Otheguy et al. 2007, Otheguy & Zentella 2012, and there are others that do not (Silva-Corvalán 1994, Bayley & Pease-Alvarez 1997, Hurtado 2001, Flores-Ferrán 2004, Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010a,b, Cerrón-Palomino 2016, Limerick 2017, Bessett 2018. ...
... In bilingual communities in the US, some studies note that difference between same and change in subject happens to a lesser degree than among monolingual speakers (Otheguy & Zentella 2012, Limerick 2017. However, in other US bilingual communities, the switch reference constraint shows similar results to monolingual speakers (Silva-Corvalán 1994, Hurtado 2001, Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2018, Cerrón-Palomino 2016, Bessett 2018. ...
... These results indicate a first parallel between the two communities as well as to the Phoenix, Arizona community whose speakers produce expressed pronouns at a rate of 23.2% (Cerrón-Palomino 2016). While there are clear parallels between Arizona and Texas, in terms of overall frequency, the speakers in New Mexico (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010a) as well as California (Silva-Corvalán 1994) show higher rates of 32% and 34.7%, respectively, diverging from the pattern. However, these rates all fall well within the range of monolingual Mexican communities which run from 16.7% in Sonora (Bessett 2018) to 33% in Xalapa (Orozco 2016), showing similar patterns of subject pronoun expression in the Mexican Spanish spoken on both sides of the US-Mexico border. ...
... [ FOC Hundreds of people died].' (Mexico, press) Previous studies on subject placement with unaccusatives in the fields of sociolinguistics and language acquisition (cf. Silva-Corvalán, 1994;Zapata et al., 2005; respectively; inter alia) have observed that HSs of Spanish may use Subject-Verb (SV) order in sentences like the bracketed one in (1) more frequently than do monolingual speakers, who tend to opt for Verb-Subject (VS) order more often with this construction (for which VS order is taken to be the felicitous option). Some scholars have implied that an inclination towards SV order in presentational unaccusative sentences instantiating sentence focus (sentence-focus unaccusatives henceforth) in HSs' perception and production may be a sign of flux, instability, or cross-linguistic influence in their underlying mental grammars, resulting from prolonged contact with English, a more rigidly Subject-Verb (Object) (SV(O)) language than Spanish. ...
... In her (Silva-Corvalán, 1982) study, she concluded that "the constraints on the occurrence of the [subject] expression and placement variables are independent of dialect, that is to say, they reflect a general characteristic of the Spanish language" (Silva-Corvalán, 1982: 119). Later, in her (Silva-Corvalán, 1994) study, she argued that there was no direct or wholesale cross-linguistic transfer from English akin to syntactic calquing or copying of the SV pattern with intransitive verbs. Instead, she argued for "indirect" contact effects in that there was an emergent, gradual tendency towards pre-verbal subject placement among HSs with presentational unaccusative constructions. ...
... Gondra (2020) also deployed the contextualized production task and obtained results that were more in line with Zapata et al. (2005). Based on corpus or oral data, several sociolinguistic studies (Llompart, 2016;Silva-Corvalán, 1994) have observed that HSs demonstrated increased variability in their SV/VS order choice rather than across-theboard SV preference. This suggests that HSs can still produce felicitous VS order in sentence-focus unaccusatives like the one shown in (1). ...
https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1iglk5YrU-LhB
Adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish show Subject-Verb (SV)/Verb-Subject (VS) word-order variation in unaccusative sentences marking sentence focus, while monolingual speakers favor VS, as in Llegó Sara ‘Sara arrived’. Yet, few empirical studies have explored the distributional rates and patterns associated with this word-order variation in perception and production among HSs. We examine the variable-rule system underlying HSs’ acceptability judgments and written-narrative production to articulate how their choices between SV and VS are constrained. We begin with an alternative argument to the Unaccusativity Hypothesis, that unaccusatives instantiating sentence focus are instances of locative inversion where the preverbal position is occupied by an explicit or silent spatiotemporal argument (stage topic) licensing VS order. The results of two context-rich, novel experiments revealed two properties that contributed to HSs’ use of VS order: an explicit stage topic and a subject longer than four words. If these were not realized, HSs became increasingly inclined towards SV order. Assuming that interpreting a silent stage topic or a short subject taxes the cognitive resources required to retrieve the relevant discourse-pragmatic information, our findings support recent acquisition theories that attribute HSs’ divergent patterns to processing costs rather than the traditional view based on cross-linguistic influence.
... La simplificación del sistema de los demostrativos se manifiesta en la reducción de los usos de una de las formas que aparecen en contextos similares que sirven para indicar la misma distancia. Se ha demostrado que la coexistencia de dos o más formas lingüísticas que comparten las mismas áreas semánticas, o áreas vecinas, ofrece una situación propicia para el desarrollo de posibles cambios lingüísticos (Silva-Corvalán 1994). Es lo que ocurre en el caso de los demostrativos del español, ya que los hablantes se han encargado de simplificar a sólo dos el sistema heredado de tres grados (Alarcos Llorach 1976). ...
... La hipótesis fundamental de este estudio se relaciona con el papel que desempeña la situación de contacto lingüístico en este proceso avanzado de cambio tendiente a imponer la forma ese en los medios monolingües. Las situaciones de contacto lingüístico aceleran los cambios que tienen una motivación interna (Silva-Corvalán 1994;Gutiérrez 1995Gutiérrez , 1997Gutiérrez , 2001; además, el inglés es una lengua que tiene distribución binaria en el plano de los demostrativos. Debido a estos dos hechos, se podría esperar que el avance de la forma innovadora continúe de manera clara en el transcurso de las generaciones, lo que podría dar como resultado, incluso, la desaparición de la forma aquel. ...
... La primera generación de Houston presentó el mismo resultado. Esto puede indicar, como se ha demostrado en estudios anteriores sobre el español de los Estados Unidos, que la situación de contacto ha acelerado el cambio que ya se encuentra en un estado bastante avanzado en la situación monolingüe (Silva-Corvalán 1994Gutiérrez 1995Gutiérrez , 1997Gutiérrez , 2001. Las diferencias entre los hablantes de Los Reyes de Salgado y los de la primera generación de Houston, y las de este último grupo y las generaciones segunda y tercera, son notables; el avance de la forma más extendida, ese, hace prácticamente categórica esta forma en las nuevas generaciones, mientras que aquel aparece en escasos contextos. ...
El presente trabajo examina los adjetivos demostrativos ese y aquel en conversaciones videograbadas con hablantes de tres generaciones de Houston, Texas, y de un grupo control de México. Los resultados indican que ambos demostrativos aún son usados en el español de México y en la primera generación de Houston; en las generaciones dos y tres, sin embargo, aquel aparece con una frecuencia muy baja. El uso temporal es el que más se mantiene en el caso de la forma aquel; los significados espaciales y referenciales sólo permanecen en el medio monolingüe y en los hablantes de primera generación.
... Our selection of subject forms as the object of study is based in large part on the wealth of research available on their variable use. Collectively, sociolinguistic studies show that variation between null subjects and overt subject pronouns (SPs) is constrained by factors such as person/number, verbal tense, mood, and aspect (TMA), reflexivity of the verb, lexical content of the verb, and specificity of the referent as well as by discourse-related factors beyond the verb phrase, such as perseveration, discourse genre, referent cohesiveness and clause type (e.g., Carvalho et al. 2015, Shin & Otheguy 2009, Silva-Corvalán 1994, Travis & Torres Cacoullos 2012. Although there is a tendency to limit the study of subject forms to null and overt SPs, there has recently been expansion to study the patterns that influence the realization of subject forms as full lexical noun phrases (NPs), even in contexts where they have been mentioned previously. ...
... With few exceptions, variationist research on subject expression in Spanish has focused on the variation between null and overt SPs and the analyses are limited to contexts that are determined to permit variation between the two forms . Nonetheless, there are studies that suggest that these two forms are in variation with others, most notably full lexical NPs which have been shown to occur even following an adjacent previous mention of the same subject (Bentivoglio 1993, Dumont 2006, Gudmestad & Geeslin 2022, Gudmestad et al. 2013, Silva-Corvalán 2015. 2 Previous variationist research on subject expression in Spanish has found that variation between null and overt SPs is constrained by morphosyntactic factors such as person/number, tense, mood, and aspect (TMA), lexical frequency and reflexivity of the verb, semantic factors such as lexical content of the verb and specificity of the referent, discourse-level factors such as switch reference 3 , referent cohesiveness, the form of the previous mention of the subject (i.e., perseveration), discourse genre, clause type, as well as some extra-linguistic factors (Ávila-Jiménez 1995, Bayley & Pease-Alvarez 1996, 1997, Bentivoglio 1987, Cameron 1994, 1995, Cameron & Flores-Ferrán 2004, Enríquez 1984, Erker & Guy 2012, Flores-Ferrán 2005, Hochberg 1986, Morales 1986, Otheguy & Zentella 2012, Shin 2006, Shin & Cairns 2009, Shin & Otheguy 2009, Silva-Corvalán 1994, Travis 2007, Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010; inter alia). The discourse-level factors previously mentioned have been found to be crucial in explaining subject expression in Spanish and are the focus of the current study. ...
... Perhaps the most widely studied discourse-level factor is switch reference (Bayley & Pease-Alvarez 1997, Bentivoglio 1987, Cameron 1994, 1995, Cameron & Flores-Ferrán 2004, Erker & Guy 2012, Silva-Corvalán 1994, Shin & Cairns 2009, Shin & Otheguy 2009, Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010, Travis 2007). Contexts where the subject referent is different from the referent of the previous tensed verb are known as "switch reference" while situations where these two referents are the same are known as "same reference". ...
... They affirm, like Torres Cacoullos and Travis (2010), that to consider contact-induced change, there must be differences in constraint hierarchies. Other scholars (e.g., Silva-Corvalán, 1994;Sorace, 2012) argue that bilinguals demonstrate a process of simplification of certain morphosyntactic or discourse constraints via "indirect" influence, whereby they lighten the cognitive load to facilitate using and processing two linguistic systems. For instance, Silva-Corvalán (1994) argues that there is no direct structural transfer from English to Spanish in Los Angeles, but that there is indirect influence through the increase of features that already exist in Spanish, and that these features can manifest in extended pragmatic contexts when compared to noncontact varieties (e.g., increases in the indicative mood in contexts canonically reserved for the subjunctive mood). ...
... Other scholars (e.g., Silva-Corvalán, 1994;Sorace, 2012) argue that bilinguals demonstrate a process of simplification of certain morphosyntactic or discourse constraints via "indirect" influence, whereby they lighten the cognitive load to facilitate using and processing two linguistic systems. For instance, Silva-Corvalán (1994) argues that there is no direct structural transfer from English to Spanish in Los Angeles, but that there is indirect influence through the increase of features that already exist in Spanish, and that these features can manifest in extended pragmatic contexts when compared to noncontact varieties (e.g., increases in the indicative mood in contexts canonically reserved for the subjunctive mood). In other words, there are no new features transferred from English to Spanish, but simply an increase in typical Spanish features and in new contexts. ...
... For instance, Erker et al. (2017) found an increased use of preverbal SPs for U.S.-born Cubans as compared to Cuban newcomers to NYC (99% vs. 99% preverbal, respectively). Likewise, Raña-Risso and Barrera-Tobón (2018) found a higher preverbal pronominal rate among the U.S. born when considering several Latin American origin groups in NYC (94% first-generation immigrants vs. 97% U.S. born; see also Silva-Corvalán, 1994). ...
Aims and objectives: The current paper utilizes corpus data to examine variation and potential language contact effects regarding pronominal subject placement among first-generation immigrants in Atlanta, with particular attention paid to the individual speaker. The research questions that guide the study are the following: What linguistic and social predictors govern subject placement in Mexican Spanish spoken in Roswell, GA? What role, if any, does English contact play in the overall preverbal rates and/or constraints that govern subject placement? Do the data show any substantial individual differences with regard to rates of subject placement? If so, how might the inclusion vs. exclusion of these speakers influence the overall interpretation of the results?
Design and data: This study employs a variationist sociolinguistic framework, and the speakers comprise 20 first-generation Mexican immigrants living in Georgia.
Analysis: Descriptive statistics are employed for purposes of overall as well as individual usage rates of postverbal subjects. Additionally, linguistic (e.g., person/number, priming) and social predictors (e.g., sex, English proficiency, preferred media language) were incorporated into logistic regression analyses using Rbrul.
Findings: Pronominal subject placement is most strongly influenced by person/number. Third-person singular pronouns favor postverbals while other pronouns favor preverbal position. Regarding social predictors, both sex and preferred media language appeared to play significant roles in the initial analysis; however, upon considering outlier speaker effects, the apparent effect of sex disappeared. The media language effect shows that those with a preference for English media favor preverbal subjects, suggesting a potential language contact effect.
Originality and implications: The current study is the first to analyze this phenomenon in Southeastern U.S. Spanish. The findings have implications for the study of language contact and change, demonstrating the importance of considering how individual speakers could misrepresent the overall data, interpretations of results, and conclusions in sociolinguistic studies of bilingualism.
... One of the most debated features of SPE in US Spanish is the overall frequency with which bilinguals express pronouns, specifically if they do so at a higher rate than monolinguals, since in English, pronouns are expressed at nearly categorical rates. There are some studies that show a higher rate (Shin & Otheguy 2005, Otheguy et al. 2007, Otheguy & Zentella 2012, and there are others that do not (Silva-Corvalán 1994, Bayley & Pease-Alvarez 1997, Hurtado 2001, Flores-Ferrán 2004, Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010a,b, Cerrón-Palomino 2016, Limerick 2017, Bessett 2018. ...
... In bilingual communities in the US, some studies note that difference between same and change in subject happens to a lesser degree than among monolingual speakers (Otheguy & Zentella 2012, Limerick 2017. However, in other US bilingual communities, the switch reference constraint shows similar results to monolingual speakers (Silva-Corvalán 1994, Hurtado 2001, Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2018, Cerrón-Palomino 2016, Bessett 2018. ...
... These results indicate a first parallel between the two communities as well as to the Phoenix, Arizona community whose speakers produce expressed pronouns at a rate of 23.2% (Cerrón-Palomino 2016). While there are clear parallels between Arizona and Texas, in terms of overall frequency, the speakers in New Mexico (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010a) as well as California (Silva-Corvalán 1994) show higher rates of 32% and 34.7%, respectively, diverging from the pattern. However, these rates all fall well within the range of monolingual Mexican communities which run from 16.7% in Sonora (Bessett 2018) to 33% in Xalapa (Orozco 2016), showing similar patterns of subject pronoun expression in the Mexican Spanish spoken on both sides of the US-Mexico border. ...
This study provides a cross-dialectic comparison of first person singular subject pronoun expression in the Spanish varieties of two US-Mexico borderland communities , Southern Arizona and Southeast Texas. Using data collected from sociolin-guistic interviews of 32 Spanish/English bilingual speakers, this analysis further explores the impact that trans-frontier practices have on the realization of subject pronouns in border communities and demonstrates the similarities in the variable grammar of the Spanish spoken in the US Southwest. The results show that both Arizona and Texas express first person singular pronouns at a similar rate (19.3% and 18.7%, respectively). Additionally, the linguistic factors that condition the variable (switch reference; clause type; tense, mood, and aspect; and whether or not the verb is reflexive) are very similar within each group.
... En 2024 ha transcurrido más de un cuarto de siglo desde que se pusiera en marcha la iniciativa de abordar la investigación sociolingüística del español de España y América de una manera coordinada. Ya en 1992 Carmen Silva Corvalán había puesto sobre la mesa la necesidad de contar con un corpus de datos que sirviera como base para llevar a cabo un estudio sociolingüístico del español en toda su extensión y diversidad geográfica (Silva-Corvalán, 1994), pero fue Moreno Fernández quien formalizó públicamente esta iniciativa en abril de 1993, en el X Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de la América Latina (ALFAL) (Moreno Fernández, 1993). Tres años más tarde, en el Congreso de la ALFAL celebrado en las Palmas de Gran Canaria, se presentaba el primer borrador de la metodología que sentaría las bases para el desarrollo del macro corpus que hoy conocemos bajo las siglas de PRESEEA: «Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y América» (Moreno Fernández, 1996). ...
... I will not review influences on Spanish in the United States, such as those carefully studied in Silva- Corvalán (1994) and many others that show the influence of American English on Spanish from the phonetic to the semanto-pragmatic and every level in between. An equally impressive review of indigenous language influences on Spanish could be given, ranging from the reconfiguration of the vowels under the influence of the Quechua allophonic system (Pasquale, 2001) to the semanto-pragmatic influence of Quechua grammaticalized evidentials on Bolivian morphosyntax and pragmatics (Babel, 2009). ...
En 2024 se cumplió un cuarto de siglo desde que se pusiera en marcha la iniciativa de una investigación sociolingüística coordinada del español. Este objetivo se ha logrado en el marco del “Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y América” (PRESEEA), desde cuyas bases metodológicas se ha recopilado el mayor corpus de datos de la lengua española en las principales capitales del mundo hispanohablante. A su vez, este gran corpus ha sido la base para una enorme cantidad de trabajos de investigación. Partiendo de los fundamentos establecidos en el PRESEEA, la monografía aporta una visión de conjunto de la investigación sociolingüística a través de dieciséis capítulos relativos a una selección de comunidades hispanohablantes (Buenos Aires, Ciudad de México, Granada, La Habana, Las Palmas, Madrid, Málaga, Medellín, Pamplona, Santiago de Chile, Sevilla, Valencia). En algunos de estos, se repasa el estado de la investigación sociolingüística en distintas comunidades urbanas hispanohablantes, mientras que en otros se ilustra la evolución teórica y metodológica de la disciplina mediante el análisis de los fenómenos lingüísticos variables del español.
... In this study, we consider the sources of heritage language innovations in the context of contact-induced language change and the psycholinguistic mechanism that may be at play. For example, Silva-Corvalán (1994) argued that some of the changes observed in the Mexican Spanish heritage speakers from Los Angeles studied, such as the expansion of the copula estar to contexts where the copula ser is more felicitous, were not due to transfer from the majority language English, but due to ongoing diachronic internal changes in the Spanish language, accelerated by the language contact situation. Carando (2015), Kupisch and Polinsky (2022), Montrul (2022), Martínez Bruera et al. (2023 and Rinke et al. (2024) are recent studies linking grammatical patterns attested in heritage languages with patterns common in diachronic language change. ...
... A total of 77 first-and second-generation Mexican-origin immigrants in the United States and 41 Spanish native speakers in Northern Mexico (Guanajuato) were recruited. First-generation immigrants are foreign nationals who immigrate as adults; secondgeneration immigrants are their children, born or very early arrivals in the host country (Silva-Corvalán, 1994). The participants were divided into four groups: 32 simultaneous bilingual heritage speakers (those who were exposed to English and Spanish from birth or before age 4), 25 sequential bilingual heritage speakers (those exposed to Spanish since birth but to Spanish and English after age 5), 20 firstgeneration adult immigrants and 41 adult Mexican native speakers. ...
The language of heritage speakers is characterized by variability and structural innovations compared to the baseline grammar of first-generation immigrants. Although many factors contribute to these differences, this study considers structural priming with structures that do not exist in the majority language as a potential mechanism for language change. The linguistic focus is accusative clitic doubling, which exists in some Spanish varieties, but which is unacceptable in others. Our research examined how flexible heritage speakers’ grammars are compared to baseline speakers, and to what extent heritage speakers adopt structures attested in the diachronic development and in other varieties of their heritage language. In two studies, we tested the acceptability of accusative clitic doubling and primed accusative clitic doubling in oral production. Results showed that heritage speakers of Spanish are somewhat accepting of innovative structures and more sensitive to structural priming compared to baseline speakers, who are generally not.
... Despite overall lower rates of subjunctive mood production compared to Spanish-dominant adults (e.g., Martillo Viner, 2016Montrul, 2009;Silva-Corvalán, 1994a, 1994b, adult HSs use the subjunctive in volitional clauses more consistently than in other contexts (van Osch et al., 2017). When comparing differences within HS populations, multiple studies have reported that morphosyntactic proficiency affects command of subjunctive mood (Giancaspro, 2019;Montrul, 2009;Montrul & Perpiñán, 2011). ...
... HSs' variable use of subjunctive mood is also consistent with previous large-scale analyses of naturalistic data concerning subjunctive development. Specifically, both Silva-Corvalán (1994a, 1994b and Martillo Viner (2016) reveal gradual yet partial loss of subjunctive mood over generations. In fact, in his naturalistic data, Martillo Viner (2016) reports that adult HSs used the Spanish subjunctive in all of the same contexts of obligatory selection as SDBAs, but with greater variability, leading him to describe that HSs possess a "variable mood grammar" (p. ...
The present study tested Spanish heritage speakers' (HSs') production and selection of subjunctive mood in volitional clauses. Four groups participated to expose the effects of age on subjunctive acquisition: Spanish-dominant bilingual adults (SDBA; n = 18), HSs in fifth grade (HS5; n = 41), HSs in seventh/eighth grades (HS7/8; n = 34) and HS adults (HSA; n = 34). SDBAs produced and selected the subjunctive more than HS groups. There were no differences in production and selection between the HS7/8 and HSA groups, both of whom produced and selected subjunctive mood more frequently than the HS5 group. These results point toward protracted heritage language development. HSs selected the subjunctive more than they produced it, supporting theories that dissociate between mapping forms onto morphology and underlying syntactic competence. Finally, proficiency and frequency of use modulated individual variability between HSs. Results are addressed relative to incomplete acquisition, protracted development and feature reassembly.
... Research shows that positive attitudes towards Spanish and Spanish language maintenance do not necessarily go hand in hand. In a study of attitudes across multiple generations of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, Silva-Corvalán (1994) observed that commitment to language maintenance, including participation in activities promoting Spanish and Mexican culture, significantly decreased with longer family residence in the United States, despite consistently positive attitudes toward the Spanish language and Mexican culture across all generational groups. Similar results were obtained by Lamboy (2011) in his study of the attitudes of Puerto Ricans in Central Florida and New York City: "language is adopted as a symbol, but its maintenance is not necessarily adopted as a behavior of practice" (p. ...
... When bilingualism and the use of vernacular languages are stigmatized nationally and locally, an effective defense of the language may be the acceptance and positive evaluation of the only Spanish that the community can guarantee, the one that is spoken daily among community members. According to Silva-Corvalán (1994), although linguistic change appears to conflict with linguistic loyalty to Spanish, in reality, these changes represent a successful strategy for maintaining Spanish among second-and third-generation speakers. ...
Despite the burgeoning Latino population in the Midwest, research on language attitudes in this region remains sparse. This study addresses this gap by examining language attitudes and beliefs towards Spanish in the Northwest Indiana region, one of the oldest Latino immigration gateways in the Midwest. Data collected from a 2018–2019 sociolinguistic survey, involving 236 participants representative of the local Latino community, form the basis of the analysis. The study aims to elucidate attitudes towards various Spanish dialects, particularly the local variety. Findings indicate widespread acceptance of the local Spanish variety, with participants viewing its divergence from Mexican or Puerto Rican Spanish as normal and inevitable. Despite perceptions of linguistic mixing with English, the community’s Spanish is valued as an effective communication tool and cultural asset, including in educational settings. This positive attitude towards a stigmatized linguistic variety suggests a preference for any form of Spanish over none, particularly in situations of low Spanish language maintenance. The study of language attitudes shows that speakers will tend to reproduce in their speech new ways of speaking that they find acceptable. This generalized behavior, in turn, leads toward linguistic change.
... Relatedly, Velazquez (2013) focused on parental motivations, attitudes, and linguistic practices related to the intergenerational language transmission in a Spanish-speaking community. Her goal was to examine HL transmission to children depending on community linguistic ecology, given the centrality of family linguistic policies for the loss or maintenance of Spanish (Silva-Corvalán 1994;Tse 2001;Arriagada 2005;Worthy and Rodríguez-Galindo 2006). Velazquez quantified language attitudes (Karan 2000;Karan and Stalder 2000), ethnolinguistic vitality (Bourhis et al. 1981;Yagmur et al. 1999), family language use (Tse 2001), and the mother's network of social interaction (L. ...
... 2 This term is borrowed from the theory of possible L2 selves (Dörnyei 1994(Dörnyei , 2009, which posits that learners perceive an association between their current and future self-concepts, and they desire to move from one's actual to future L2 selves, which drives their motivated learning behavior. 3 Here, "generation" refers to Silva-Corvalán's (1994) definition of sociolinguistic generation, which labels individuals depending on an individual's age or their predecessors' when they arrived or were born in the United States. 4 Students were able to stop and resume with the questionnaire later. ...
This study explores the motivation and attitudes of heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, focusing on the influence of their social networks. Previous research highlighted variations in HS motivation, attributed to social, cultural, and contextual factors. The study investigates how HS communities shape motivation and attitudes towards learning the heritage language (HL). Employing personal network analysis, the research surveyed 26 Spanish HSs in a Spanish heritage language program. Results revealed that HS networks primarily consisted of emotionally close family members. Positive and negative factors within these networks, such as language support, confidence, shame, and expectations, significantly influenced HS motivation and attitudes. Language attitudes within the network positively impacted individual attitudes, indicating a process of internalizing shared values. The study emphasizes the importance of considering the context surrounding HSs and suggests that addressing language expectations and fostering language support in communities may positively transform perceptions of Spanish in the United States. The findings underscore the effectiveness of a personal network approach in recreating the external environment beyond the language classroom.
... Debido a la supuesta simplificación del sistema de modo (Lynch, 1999;Montrul, 2016;Silva-Corvalán, 1994Erker y Otheguy, 2016) en el español de Estados Unidos han surgido varias posturas teóricas que tratan de explicar por qué y cómo ocurre esta simplificación. En este trabajo me concentro en los enfoques generativistas, aunque existen también posturas sociolingüísticas (Silva-Corvalán, Otheguy y Zentella, 2011) variacionistas (Lynch 1999; Viner2016) y experimentales (van Osch y Sleeman, 2018; Giancaspro, Pérez-Cortés y Higdon, 2022; López-Beltrán, 2021; Valdés-Kroff, Villegas y Dussias, en prensa). ...
... Existen diversos estudios que exponen que el español de Estados Unidos, debido al contexto sociopolítico y al contacto con la len-80 gua mayoritaria, presenta una reducción en el sistema morfológico de tiempo, aspecto y modo. Sin embargo, quizá por razones estructurales, el modo es la categoría más vulnerable (Pérez-Cortés, 2016) y presenta mayor variabilidad en su uso (Merino, 1983;Lipski, 1993;Silva Corvalán, 1994Zentella, 1997;Lynch, 1999;Montrul, 2007Montrul, , 2009Montrul, , 2016. Concretamente, el indicativo tiende a remplazar el subjuntivo cuando existe la posibilidad de alternar e incluso cuando es obligatorio. ...
Este estudio examina la selección que hacen los hablantes de español como lengua heredada del subjuntivo del español. Estos hablantes han sido, normalmente, comparados con hablantes monolingües, y se ha dicho que su producción se asemeja a la de los aprendientes de español como segunda lengua. En este trabajo se problematiza esa hipótesis mediante dos instrumentos: uno de producción y otro de comprensión, los cuales fueron aplicados a tres grupos de contraste —hablantes de español como lengua heredada, aprendientes de español como segunda lengua y hablantes monolingües de español—. Los resultados muestran que existen diferencias significativas entre los grupos de contraste, de lo cual se puede concluir que son tres poblaciones distintas y que el grupo de hablantes de español como lengua heredada forma un grupo de estudio en sí mismo, que se distingue del grupo de aprendientes de español como segunda lengua y el grupo monolingüe.
... In light of the rich variation that exists in copula usage, not only among learners but also among native speakers, these verbs have been the focus of sociolinguistic studies in the Spanish varieties of the United States (Silva-Corvalán 1994), Cuba (Díaz-Campos et al. 2017), Venezuela (Díaz-Campos and Geeslin 2011), Costa Rica (Aguilar-Sánchez 2009), Mexico (de Jonge 1993;Gutiérrez 1992;Juárez-Cummings 2014), Puerto Rico (Brown and Cortés-Torres 2012), and Spain (Geeslin and Guijarro-Fuentes 2006;Isasa 2014). In addition, this phenomenon has been examined in studies on language contact (e.g., Geeslin and Guijarro-Fuentes 2008). ...
... As many of these speakers are second and third generation residents of the United States, their linguistic connections to other language contexts are reduced, with a much greater tendency to follow the norms identified among Latinx communities in the U.S. (Silva-Corvalán 1994) and to develop their own individual linguistic personas based on their unique social situation (e.g., Lynch and Avineri 2021). This is based on the type of input that these students are relying on; while heritage learners make use of community input, classroom learners are more likely to favor instructional input, causing the former to start off more closely resembling L1 norms. ...
The current study examines variation in copula selection in Spanish by looking at the written productions of three groups of language learners in the United States, including heritage learners, those with English as an L1, and international students with English as an L2. Research on copula variation in Spanish has pinpointed several key linguistic and social factors that influence selection; this study aims to apply these findings to heritage learners in order to determine how their acquisition differs from that of non-native language learners. This analysis used the COWS-L2H corpus of Spanish from the University of California, Davis. Examining over 8000 tokens of [adjective + copula] constructions in variable contexts where both ser and estar were used, the study tracks how linguistic and extralinguistic factors condition copula selection within the three learner groups and how these results compare to previous findings. Seven factors were predictive of copula selection: resultant state, frame of reference, adjective class, experience with study abroad, essay prompt, student age, and course level. Heritage learner copula use was found to be governed by a different set of predictors than that of learners, hinting at the variable motivations and backgrounds that influence use and reflect the identity goals of these speakers.
... Overwhelmingly, this case of mood selection has been discussed through a pan-Hispanic analysis, but several more recent studies (i.e., Gonzalez Salinas 2003;Garcia 2011;Gallego and Alonso-Marks 2014) discuss varietal differences in Spanish mood selection. The most widely studied cases of contact varieties and mood selection are in US Spanish, such as Silva-Corvalán (1994) in Los Angeles, Lynch (1999) in Miami, Torres (1989) and Bookhammer (2013) in New York City, and Waltermire (2014) in New Mexico. Silva-Corvalán (1994) suggests that the grammatical mood system has been simplified or undergone reductions in subjunctive use, with the subjunctive being replaced by the indicative mood. ...
... The most widely studied cases of contact varieties and mood selection are in US Spanish, such as Silva-Corvalán (1994) in Los Angeles, Lynch (1999) in Miami, Torres (1989) and Bookhammer (2013) in New York City, and Waltermire (2014) in New Mexico. Silva-Corvalán (1994) suggests that the grammatical mood system has been simplified or undergone reductions in subjunctive use, with the subjunctive being replaced by the indicative mood. Other mood patterns observed in contact varieties include cases in which the conditional has replaced the imperfect subjunctive in other varieties of Spanish (see Fernández Ulloa 1996 for Basque-Spanish and Barnes 2009 for Veneto-Spanish), the use of the indicative under negated doxastic predicates in Guaraní-Spanish in Paraguay (Granada 1979), and the use of the infinitive instead of the subjunctive in Spanish-Portuguese contact (Elizaincín 2004) and Guaraní-Spanish contact (Granada 1979). ...
In Yucatec Spanish, both the indicative and subjunctive are permitted under belief predicates. Using possible worlds semantics as a framework, I present Yucatec Spanish data that contains quantified expressions (such as pocos "few", muchos "many") and doxastic expressions (creer "to believe"). The data support the idea of (non)veridicality (Giannakidou and Mari 2020) and support previous claims (Bove 2020b, in press) that the indicative identifies the set of possible worlds as worlds that include those in which p is true or ¬p is true, whereas the subjunctive identifies the set of possible worlds as those including ◊p and ◊¬p worlds that produces a conjectural interpretation. In Yucatec Maya, speakers can communicate several levels of certainty through markers including míin, which marks conjecture and first-person subjective evaluation (Anderbois 2019, in press; Vapnarsky 2018). Therefore, I argue that this unanticipated use of the subjunctive is the result of language contact.
... We note that this definition of "first generation" does not followSilva-Corvalán's (1994) classic framework, whereby an individual is considered first generation if they were born and lived outside the US until at least age 12. All of our so-called first generation participants moved to the continental US prior to age 12. ...
This exploratory study examines rhotic production by Caribbean Spanish speakers in the US to empirically investigate (1) claims of categorical employment of the typically variable lateralization rule and (2) whether lateralized rhotics maintain acoustic features that distinguish underlying liquid phonemes. Thirty college-aged Spanish-English bilinguals of Caribbean descent living in the US completed a guided picture description task that elicited specific tokens (n = 48) containing coda /ɾ/ and /l/ in identical phonetic contexts. Coda /ɾ/ productions were coded categorically (in terms of the allophone produced) and acoustically (with measures of duration, formant values at static time points, and formant trajectories). Rates of lateralization were examined, and acoustic characteristics of lateralized rhotics were compared statistically to those of underlying laterals. Results suggest high rates of lateralization of coda /ɾ/ across several speakers, though little evidence of categorical lateralization (i.e., one speaker). Additionally, at the group level, /ɾ/ and /l/ were found to maintain some significant acoustic differences in formant structure at static time points. However, at the individual level, fewer than half of speakers exhibited differences between /ɾ/ and /l/ across 10 acoustic measures. Findings are discussed in light of previous claims of potential phonological and lexical change.
... Los autores describen la lengua en Las aventuras de don Chipote, o cuando los pericos mamen en términos generales, por tratarse principalmente de menciones y clasificaciones, más literarias que lingüísticas. Por ejemplo, los autores mencionan que, en la novela, en efecto, todos estos rasgos o características han sido atribuidos al español mexicoamericano, y por lo tanto, han sido comentados por investigadores previos desde distintas aproximaciones lingüísticas (Alvord y Thompson, 2020;Leeman y Fuller, 2022;Lipski, 2008;Sánchez, 1994;Silva-Corvalán, 1994; entre muchos otros). ...
The concepts of linguistic ideologies and attitudes have been crucial for explaining the linguistic behaviors of individuals and social groups. This study will analyze the role of language in power relations and the importance of ideologies on discourse, focusing on two novels about Mexican immigration and three Spanish-language newspapers published in Texas during the first half of the 20th century. Through these printed publications, I will examine how the linguistic ideologies that emerged in southwestern communities at the beginning of the last century are reflected in the literary and journalistic production of the time. The analysis reveals that bilingual speech is depicted negatively in the printed discourse and evokes, since the early 20th century, ideas about “what is correct” and “what is pure”, alongside notions concerning the role of language in shaping national, cultural and linguistic identities.
... These explanations are consistent with the data as well as with the view of contact-induced word order convergence as a result of the extension of a preexisting parallel construction (e.g. Silva-Corvalán 1994 ; Heine 2008). ...
This chapter offers a brief overview of the word order typology of Qəltu-Arabic and Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken by minorities in southeastern Anatolia. Constituent ordering is generally consistent with the typology of VO languages, and representative of the majority of Central Semitic languages. Convergence with local languages , however, has resulted in the development of often post-predicate copulas and a higher rate of OV order, and in some doculects even a complete shift to OV.
... Convergence in word order can thus be partly understood as contact-induced reinforcement of pre-existing parallel patterns (e.g. Silva-Corvalán 1994Heine 2008: 42-43, 48-49), which presupposes that syntactic OV presumably goes back to an original situation of more fluid order driven by pragmatic configurations. ...
This chapter offers a brief overview of the word order typology of Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken by Jewish and Christian minorities of Iran and northeastern Iraq. A characteristic of the dialects in this region is the contact-induced shift from VO to OV word order under the influence of neighbouring Iranian and Turkic languages. In Iranian Azerbaijan, convergence with Azeri has resulted in an additional increase in Adjective-Noun order, and a different treatment of Addressees from Goals. In many respects, however, the constituent order remains consistent with that of so-called VO languages, such as prepositional marking and Noun-Genitive order.
... future) because related literature on Hebrew, which is a Semitic language like AA, reported that Hebrew allows null subjects in the past and future sentences, but not in the present tense sentences (Jaeggli & Safir, 1989). Additionally, tense, is reported to constrain pro-drop variability in pro-drop languages such as Spanish (Silva-Corvalán, 1994;Travis & Cacoullos, 2012). As for polarity (declarative vs. negative), Cacoullos and Travis (2013) provided evidence that polarity can have effects on the variation of overt and null subject pronouns in Spanish. ...
Purpose. This article investigates the distribution of overt and null subject pronouns in Ammani Arabic (AA) from a variationist perspective, identifying social and linguistic constraints that shape pronoun expression. The study examines how age, gender, and educational attainment, alongside grammatical person, sentence polarity (positive vs. negative), tense, clause type (root vs. embedded), and verbal component (verbal vs. verbless), impact the choice between overt and null pronouns.
Methods. The analysis draws on a dataset of 32 sociolinguistic interviews, totaling over 32 hours of recorded data. Each interview was coded to capture both social factors and syntactic environments that affect pronoun usage. Using distributional and multivariate statistical methods, the study reveals the systematic structures underlying pronoun variation in AA.
Results. Findings show that pro-drop in AA is significantly influenced by both social and linguistic factors. Socially, age and gender play key roles in pronoun use, reflecting strong links between pronoun choice and demographic identity. Linguistically, factors like verbal component, clause type, polarity, and grammatical person are crucial in determining the choice between overt and null pronouns, establishing predictable and structured patterns in pronoun expression. This variation is shown to be rule-governed rather than random.
Conclusions. The study demonstrates that pro-drop in AA follows structured, rule-based patterns shaped by identifiable social and linguistic constraints. This research enriches the understanding of subject pronoun variation in Arabic dialects, underscoring the value of variationist analysis in exploring how social meaning and linguistic structure intersect. The findings offer broader implications for understanding pronoun variation in language varieties globally, with a focus on social indexing within Arabic dialects.
... Finally, in a study of 8-to 12-year-old early bilingual and multilingual children learning Italian in a majority context, there was a clear anticipatory gender effect, but multilingual children were slower than their Italian-speaking monolingual peers (Bosch and Foppolo, 2023). In the US, many bilingual children of immigrant parents, who are referred to as heritage speakers, learn an ethnolinguistically minority language (Silva-Corvalán, 1994;Kondo-Brown, 2006). Within the US, many children who are heritage speakers of Spanish begin their formal education as Spanish-dominant speakers. ...
This study examined grammatical gender processing in school-aged children with varying levels of cumulative English exposure. Children participated in a visual world paradigm with a four-picture display where they heard a gendered article followed by a target noun and were in the context where all images were the same gender (same gender), where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender), and where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender, but there was a mismatch in the gendered article and target noun pair. We investigated 51 children (aged 5;0–10;0) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy but varied in their amount of cumulative English exposure. In addition to the visual word paradigm, all children completed an article–noun naming task, a grammaticality judgment task, and standardized vocabulary tests. Parents reported on their child’s cumulative English language exposure and current English language use. To investigate the time course of lexical facilitation effects, looks to the target were analyzed with a cluster-based permutation test. The results revealed that all children used gender in a facilitatory way (during the noun region), and comprehension was significantly inhibited when the article–noun pairing was ungrammatical rather than grammatical. Compared to children with less cumulative English exposure, children with more cumulative English exposure looked at the target noun significantly less often overall, and compared to younger children, older children looked at the target noun significantly more often overall. Additionally, children with lower cumulative English exposure looked at target nouns more in the different-gender condition than the same-gender condition for masculine items more than feminine items.
... However, mood ical concepts for L2 learners, even after several semesters of classroom instruction; especially for English native speakers whose L1 does not manifest the same system for mood distinction (Terrell et al. 1987). The difficulties in the acquisition of mood verbal morphology in Spanish for English speakers are reflected on the vast literature that has been written on the topic from different perspectives; cognitive (Correa, 2011;Travis, 2003;Ahern and Torres, 2006), pragmatic (Lunn, 1988;Mejias-Bikandi, 1998), morphosyntactic (Quesada, 1998;Gudmestad 2006), sociolinguistic (Lynch, 2000;Silva-Corvalan, 1994), psycholinguistic (Collentine, 1998), among others, mainly focusing on the morphosyntactic/semantics interface. ...
La selección del indicativo y el subjuntivo en español es una de las áreas más problemáticas para los hablantes nativos de inglés (Terrell et al., 1987; Stokes, 1988). Estas páginas presentan los resultados de un estudio piloto que examina la adquisición de la distinción de modo en español por parte de hablantes nativos de inglés, concretamente se analiza la interfaz morfo-semántica en la selección de subjuntivo. El marco teórico en el que se basa este estudio es la hipótesis de sistemas en conflicto (Rothman, 2008) analizada anteriormente con la distinción aspectual en español. La hipótesis afirma que un sistema de reglas pedagógicas entra en conflicto con la competencia lingüística subyacente del estudiante en el proceso de adquisición de la L2. Los participantes fueron divididos en cuatro grupos: (1) un grupo de estudiantes de español de nivel intermedio; (2) un grupo de estudiantes de español de nivel avanzado; (3) un grupo de hablantes de inglés con español como lengua de herencia; y (4) un grupo de control de hablantes monolingües nativos de español. Todos los participantes completaron dos tareas escritas. Los resultados aportan evidencia de la hipótesis de Rothman en otras áreas de la gramática en las que las reglas pedagógicas difieren de la gramática subyacente de la L2. Los resultados de este estudio apoyan la hipótesis de que las reglas pedagógicas interfieren en la adquisición de la producción de modo en español, pero no evitan la adquisición del rasgo morfo-semántico [± específico].
... Thus, we may be interested in the influence of L1 Spanish on the L2 English of recent migrants or their descendants in places like California (Thomas, 2019). Equally, we may be interested in the influence of varieties of English there on L1 Spanish (Silva-Corvalan, 1994). ...
Drawing on research on multilingualism in South Africa and India, this paper attempts to integrate world Englishes studies and variationist sociolinguistics; in other words, to fill in a missing dialogue between Braj Kachru and William Labov. The classic studies of variationism have been undertaken in large western centres in which the hegemony of one language is largely accepted. In the postcolonial world elsewhere, language functions and statuses are apportioned differently. This paper therefore probes the extent to which mainstream variationism is applicable outside the western milieu that it has so powerfully illuminated. This paper will outline how P languages (carrying overt prestige and power) interact with S languages (for solidarity and community interaction) within multilingual repertoires in post‐colonial contexts. The paper also explores the extent to which S and P codes interact under contact and switching in ‘third space’ moments that best capture the post‐colonial habitus among educated bilingual speakers.
... Finalmente, Silva-Corvalán (1994) destaca cómo el contacto lingüístico, influenciado por prácticas culturales y tradiciones, puede llevar a la proliferación y evolución de UFS, y que estas no son meras construcciones lingüísticas, sino manifestaciones profundas de la identidad e idiosincrasia de las comunidades que las articulan y las viven en su cotidianidad, tal como sucede en los ejemplos anteriores. En este sentido, se concuerda en que muchos de los aspectos semánticos, sintácticos y pragmáticos contribuyen a la comprensión de las estructuras, al sentido completo y la correspondencia discursiva de las UFS traídas a colación, además de generar una identidad lingüística, pues estos rasgos característicos hacen que los hablantes sientan preferencia por la mención de estas en lugar de sus equivalencias lexicológicas, como por ejemplo, "estar pedo" y "estar prendo" en lugar de "ebrio, borracho…" (Mel'čuk, 1982). ...
The Spanish language has countless variants associated with different cultures and social groups, most of them originating from Latin American countries. These variants manifest themselves in the linguistic peculiarities of each region, especially in the formation of specialized languages and slang, which is why in this article a linguistic corpus of the Mexican variant was studied, consisting of 15 phraseological units with the particle fart, which were extracted from a database of 1945 phraseological units compiled by the International and Colombian Lexical Research Group (LEXICOL). Within these typologies, there are verbal, adjectival and substantive locutions. Subsequently, the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of these constructs were determined in order to contrast them with similar variants of Colombian Spanish. This analysis made it possible to establish certain similarities in the meanings of the phraseological units of the two countries, to distinguish their discursive functionality according to the context of use, and to point out their limitations at the pragmatic level, as a result of the most common speech situations.
... This is likely due to the continual and recent flow of immigrants into the state, which also plays an important role in California and Texas. McCullough and Jenkins (2005) found a strong correlation between Language Loyalty and recent immigration in Colorado, and various scholars (Fishman 1972;Silva-Corvalán 1994, among many others) have identified continuous immigration as the most significant indicator of language maintenance in a community. ...
The recent release of 2020 U.S. Census data reflects the continued growth of the Hispanic/Latino population over the last four decades. The Hispanic/Latino population has increased by a factor of 3.25 since 1980, with nearly one in five inhabitants of the United States identifying as Hispanic or Latino. With these demographic changes, language maintenance figures have shown significant change as well. In every state, a language shift is evident, as all of the western states have lower measures of Spanish language maintenance among the Hispanic population than they did a generation ago. So, while Spanish language use is growing with regard to overall numbers in most of the Western United States, language shift is still a reality among the Latino population. Social variables such as education, income, and employment also show a different relationship with the Spanish language than they did 40 years ago. While there were strong negative correlations between Spanish language use and these variables in the previous generation, many (but not all) of these correlations have weakened, many to the point of no statistical significance in the data from 2020.
... have been explored by numerous researchers (e.g., Thomason & Kaufman, 1988;Silva-Corvalán, 1994Aboh & DeGraff, 2014; for a detailed discussion, see Baptista (2020: 163-166). To my knowledge, research on congruence and other mechanisms involved in Creole emergence does not examine PMs. ...
Pragmatic markers (PMs) are multifunctional elements that allow language users to organize and coordinate discourse and to express their attitudes and cognitive states. This study compares the discourse-pragmatic functions and distributional features of four PMs in Kwéyòl Donmnik (konsa ‘so’, èben ‘well’, papa/Bondyé ‘papa/God’, la ‘there’) with those of their etyma in French, Kwéyòl’s lexifier ((ou) comme ça, (eh) ben, bon Dieu, là), and with their counterparts in English, the colonial source language with which it has been in contact for more than two centuries (so, well, oh my God, there). The properties of the Kwéyòl PMs are determined through a corpus analysis and are then compared to descriptions of the French and English PMs in previous studies. Each of the four Kwéyòl PM’s has functions in common with its French etymon and its English counterpart as well as its own unique functions. In addition, English so performs functions in the Kwéyòl data that are unique to Kwéyòl konsa ‘so’, suggesting that so is being integrated into Kwéyòl. This study expands the limited body of work on Kwéyòl and deepens our understanding of language contact and Creole emergence at the discourse-pragmatic level, particularly in cases involving a second, non-lexifier colonial source language.
... Whether high error rates in peripheral domains of grammar can trigger change is an open question. But to the extent that language contact can accelerate diachronic change in progress (Silva-Corvalán 1994), this effect is indeed observable in HLs; cf. Rinke and Flores (2021). ...
Some grammatical phenomena are more resistant to diachronic change than others. The syntactic core is particularly resilient, raising the question why this is the case and what causes the least vulnerable properties to change. Since fundamental alterations of grammars do not occur across the lifespan of adults, first language acquisition is commonly considered to be the main locus of syntactic change. Under the assumption that language contact leads to cross-linguistic interaction, early bilinguals have been claimed to be the main agents of change. I revisit this debate, focusing on head directionality and V2. Summaries of studies of various acquisition types lead to the conclusion that reanalysis in core syntax does not happen in the course of neither monolingual nor bilingual L1 acquisition. Contrary to hypotheses entertained in diachronic linguistics, neither language contact nor structural ambiguity/complexity has this effect. For core properties to change in L1, the triggering information must be contained in the input. Insufficient exposure, as in heritage language acquisition, can cause morphosyntactic change, though not in the syntactic core. Only second language acquisition exhibits such effects. L2 learners are thus the most likely agents of fundamental syntactic change. I conclude that explanations of the resilience of syntactic phenomena cannot rely exclusively on structural aspects. It results from an interaction of syntactic and developmental factors, defined by grammatical constraint, acquisition principles, and processing demands.
... They were all pursuing undergraduate degrees at a large Texas public university, were between the ages of 20 and 24 (Mean: 21.6; SD: 1.2), and were all born in Texas with parents from Mexico. Thus, according to Silva-Corvalán's (1994) notion of sociolinguistic generation, they would all be considered second-generation (G2). Participants were recorded with a Marantz PMD660 solid-state digital recorder and a Shure WH20XLR head-worn dynamic microphone with a sampling rate of 4.1 kHz (16-bit digitization). ...
This study examines how implied speaker nationality, which serves as a proxy for bilingual/monolingual status, influences social perception and linguistic evaluation. A modified matched-guise experiment was created with the speech of eight bilingual U.S. Spanish speakers from Texas talking about family traditions; the speech stimuli remained the same, but the social information provided about the speakers–whether they were said to be from Mexico (implied monolingual) or from Texas (implied bilingual)–varied. Based on 140 listeners’ responses (77 L2 Spanish listeners, 63 heritage Spanish listeners), quantitative analyses found that overall listeners evaluated ‘Mexico’ voices as more able to teach Spanish than ‘Texas’ voices. However, only heritage listeners perceived ‘Mexico’ voices as being of higher socioeconomic status and of more positive social affect than ‘Texas’ voices. Qualitative comments similarly found that heritage listeners evaluated ‘Mexico’ voices more favorably in speech quality and confidence than ‘Texas’ voices. The implications are twofold: (i) the social information of implied monolingualism/bilingualism influences listeners’ social perceptions of a speaker, reflecting monoglossic language ideologies; and (ii) there exists indeterminacy between language and social meaning that varies based on differences in lived experiences between L2 and heritage Spanish listeners. Extending on previous findings of indeterminacy between linguistic variants and meaning, the current study shows this also applies to (implied) language varieties, demonstrating the role of language ideologies in mediating social perception.
... Bilingual children may also take longer to acquire variable features than their monolingual peers (Pirvulescu et al. 2014). Whenever young children have frequent access to both native and non-native features, a gradual emergence of new norms has been observed (Kotsinas 1988;Sharma and Sankaran 2011;Silva-Corvalán 1994) and the result of bilingual acquisition often differs from monolingual acquisition (e.g., Escobar and Potowski 2015: 88-93 for Spanish in the United States). These features may in turn be incorporated into new dialectal norms (e.g., English among London's Indian immigrant youth, Sharma and Sankaran 2011). ...
This paper analyzes the effects of child language acquisition as a critical factor in a morphological change, namely, the replacement of the etymologically singular second person paradigm ( tuteo ) by its plural counterpart ( voseo ) in 19th century Río de la Plata Spanish. The account applies a sociohistorical model which proposes that young children can function as language change agents in environments characterized by unpredictable input variation, lack of normative mechanisms, and the emergence of peer networks among young learners. The model is then applied to explain the rapid generalization of voseo in the late 1800s, a well-documented but poorly understood process. This change was nestled in an environment characterized by the rapid breakdown and reshaping of social networks through country-to-city migration and massive immigration, and by the resulting contact between L1 and L2 speakers of Iberian and non-Iberian varieties. Our account hypothesizes that successive cohorts of children actuated the various stages of this change, by relying on child language acquisition biases in the learning of verbal morphology observed across Romance varieties. This study combines archival evidence and sociohistorical information with present-day acquisitional data. The latter offers a piece often missing in sociohistorical accounts of language change.
... Heritage children's accuracy on the vocabulary task as a function of the word's cognate status and visits to Greece. in the strength of the transnational ties (Holsey, 2004), partly related to the language constraints imposed by the third-generation children's limited HL proficiency (Levitt and Waters, 2002). In terms of linguistic abilities, we found an overall crossgenerational decline, in line with existing cross-generational studies with adults (e.g., Silva-Corvalán, 1994) and children (Daskalaki et al., 2022). Specifically, the second and mixed generations did not differ from each other on subject placement in EI, and both generations differed from the third. ...
This study examined how heritage children’s experiences with the heritage
language (HL) in the country of residence (e.g., children’s generation, their
HL use and richness) and the country of origin (e.g., visits to and from the
homeland) may change as a function of the migration generation heritage
children belong to, and how this may in turn dierentially influence HL outcomes.
Fifty-eight Greek-English-speaking bilingual children of Greek heritage residing
in Western Canada and New York City participated in the study. They belonged
to three dierent generations of migration: a group of second-generation
heritage speakers, which were children of first-generation parents; a group of
mixed-generation heritage children of first- and second-generation parents; and
of third-generation heritage children with second-generation parents. They were
tested on a picture-naming task targeting HL vocabulary and on an elicitation
task targeting syntax- and discourse-conditioned subject placement. Children’s
performance on both tasks was predicted by their generation status, with the
third generation having significantly lower accuracy than the second and the
mixed generations. HL use significantly predicted language outcomes across
generations. However, visits to and from the country of origin also mattered.
This study shows that HL use in the country of residence is important for HL
development, but that it changes as a function of the child’s generation. At
the same time, the finding that the most vulnerable domains (vocabulary and
discourse-conditioned subject placement) benefited from visits to the country
of origin highlights the importance of both diversity of and exposure to a variety
spoken by more speakers and in dierent contexts for HL maintenance.
... The extracted data for the specific multiword units thus seem to confirm the previously found tendency that code-switching generally requires relatively balanced competencies in the respective languages, as typically attributed to second-generation bilinguals (e.g., Poplack, 1980;Silva-Corvalán, 1994). Furthermore, the inter-speaker differences regarding the amount of code-switching does not seem to depend on speaker-related sociolinguistic variables such as language use outside the family. ...
Aims and objectives
Code-switching and calquing are two widespread language contact phenomena in bilingual speech. While both phenomena have been discussed extensively in research on language contact in the past decades, only very few studies systematically investigate code-switching and calquing of and within multiword units or constructions. In our contribution, we aim at developing a more differentiated account of code-switching and calquing of and within multiword units and constructions, bringing together recent usage-based psycholinguistic and Construction Grammar theories and modeling with cognitively oriented approaches to language contact and bilingualism.
Design
We analyze and discuss corpus data from the Corpus of Spanish in Southern Arizona (CESA) from first-, second-, and third-generation bilingual Spanish–English speakers in Arizona.
Data and analysis
The corpus analysis focuses on code-switching and calquing of and within N Prep N, NN(N), and Adj N/N Adj patterns (N = noun, Prep = preposition, Adj = adjective).
Findings/conclusions
The analysis highlights the importance of both lexically specific multiword units and partially and fully schematic constructions in code-switching and calquing as well as a continuum between constructions situated closer to the lexical or to the syntactic pole.
Originality
Whereas multiword sequences have been found to play an important role in (mostly first language [L1]) acquisition, use, and processing, the role of multiword units and constructions in bilingual speech has been much less studied so far.
Significance/implications
The study shows that both lexically specific constructions or multiword units as well as partially or fully schematic constructions play a central role in code-switching and calquing. The study argues that code-switching and calquing may ultimately be viewed as a continuum, since the speakers rely on similar, highly frequent, and productive constructions and their interlingual correspondences for both phenomena.
Borrowing can be facilitated or inhibited by linguistic constraints in language contact situations. This paper examines one such constraint: the effects of discoursivization on the usage of Spanish discourse connectives in Balearic Catalan. Using a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of conversational corpus data, this study seeks to determine the role of discourse among the social and linguistic factors that govern this contact phenomenon. The statistical findings indicate that the Spanish and Catalan discourse connectives have undergone and continue to undergo a process of discoursivization. However, this movement towards discourse does not seem to have an effect on their usage, and instead social factors are the most significant determinants affecting the use of Spanish discourse connectives in contemporary Balearic Catalan. Nonetheless, it appears that these Spanish loanwords may be falling out of use among younger speakers as a result of linguistic normalization efforts.
Trill realizations present a wide range of cross-dialectal variation in Spanish, especially in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS). The backed /r/ in, e.g., [ká.xo] for carro, is not an exception. Since analysis with continuous variables has advanced the research on fricative variation among other Spanish varieties, the present study considers center of gravity values to provide an acoustic analysis of the backed /r/ realizations in Puerto Rican Spanish, both on the island of Puerto Rico and within the Puerto Rican diasporic community in Holyoke, Massachusetts (United States). The following three experimental production tasks were designed and employed: a picture description task, a map task, and a reading task. Furthermore, 45 participants performed the experimental tasks, i.e., 21 were recorded on the island and 24 in Holyoke. Findings show that the distribution of center of gravity values falls on a continuum, which can be affected by linguistic and sociolinguistic variables, in line with previous research on fricatives.
Bilingual children typically produce more redundant pronominal subjects than monolingual children in null subject languages like Spanish in contact with non-null subject languages like English (Montrul & Sánchez-Walker, 2013; Montrul, 2004; Paradis & Navarro, 2003; Silva-Corvalán, 1994). According to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Sorace and Serratrice, 2009; Sorace et. al. 2009; Sorace, 2011), the overextension of overt pronouns among bilinguals stems from interface constraints and processing limitations. Recent research with adults (Giannakou, 2018) found that the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis were not supported by bilingual performance in contact situations between two null subject languages, suggesting that language transfer may be at play. This study investigates the acquisition and development of pronominal subject expression in 196 school-age Spanish monolingual and Basque-Spanish bilingual children (ages 6-12), as well as adults, through a pronoun elicitation task. Basque and Spanish are both null subject languages. Findings suggest that monolingual Spanish speakers produced more redundant overt pronouns than the bilinguals, and there was overextension of null pronouns in switch-reference contexts in both populations. Not only do these results disconfirm the Interface Hypothesis, but they also support the conclusion that null and overt pronouns display a variable distribution in null subject languages.
The habla de chino is a literary imitation of the FL Spanish of Chinese origin speakers, where phonological processes reveal simplification and crosslinguistic interference, resulting in relatively homogeneous solutions. In this linguistic stereotype, every rhotic sound systematically undergoes a process of lateralization. A detailed analysis of the liquid production in naturally-occurring data from a corpus of nearly fourteen hours of the FL Spanish of bilingual speakers in a Chinese-Mexican community indicates a much more diverse phonological articulation. The different articulations that comprise the system of liquid production in Chinese-Mexican FL Spanish demonstrate a series of articulations ruled by phonetic, phonotactic, and syllabic factors that influence their production in their FL Spanish.
Cladistic methods used for making phylogenetic family trees of biological species are an important tool in evolutionary biology and linguistics. They are based on the assumption that a group of species sharing the same genetic features (genotypes) must have evolved from the same common ancestor and that such features cannot come back once vanished. However, language change can be cyclic and a law in evolutionary biology, Dollo's law, states that only features that are not genetically coded (phenotypes) can evolve in a cyclic way. Since linguistic features are phenotypic, cladistic methods used in linguistics are not reliable.
Latinx populations in the USA have grown steadily in recent decades, with significant increases taking place in “new destination communities” of the U.S. South. The focus of our paper is to highlight opportunities for working with these populations, including traditional sociolinguistic ethnographies and community-engaged research. We highlight an initiative named “The SEC Spanish Consortium” which is an interinstitutional collaboration centered on scholarship and service involving Latinx populations in new destination communities of the U.S. South. We show that ongoing and future scholarly work in the U.S. South can act as a mechanism for documenting these emerging Latinx communities while simultaneously serving the underrepresented and minority speakers of these linguistic varieties.
Intonational plateaus exist in Chilean Spanish in contexts in which they do not exist in any other variety of Spanish. Mapudungun, which has been in contact with Chilean Spanish for centuries, also has plateaus in similar contexts, although for years, the possibility of any influence of Mapudungun on Spanish has been largely dismissed. The present study examines the discourse contexts in which intonational plateaus occur in both Chilean Spanish and Mapudungun and finds that their pragmatic function is similar, with the vast majority of cases highlighting information based on the subjective communicative desire of the speaker rather than falling into established syntactic or pragmatic categories such as narrow focus. However, while the pragmatic function is similar between the languages, Mapudungun has a wider use of the plateaus, indicating a likely longer presence in this language. Based on the similarities in pragmatic function, the absence of such plateaus in any other variety of Spanish, and the wider use of plateaus in Mapudungun, this paper argues that the Chilean Spanish plateaus originate from Mapudungun due to their centuries-long history of intense language contact.
Long-distance dependencies such as relative clauses (RCs) are known to be vulnerable in heritage grammars (e.g., Montrul, 2008 ). Previous studies in RC comprehension have shown that heritage language (HL) children show similar comprehension to monolingual children ( Jia & Paradis, 2020 ), while differential performance has also been found ( Kidd et al., 2015 ). The present study investigates 11–13-year-old monolingual and German-dominant HL children’s real-time parsing strategies in subject relative clause (SRC) and object relative clause (ORC) processing in Greek. We conducted a self-paced listening task in Greek in which we manipulated the type of RC (subject vs. object), and the RC internal word order (canonical vs. scrambled). Our analyses revealed no significant group differences between HL and monolingual children. Both groups of children processed SRCs faster than ORCs on the critical RC verb segment. We also examined if case-marked pre-verbal NPs would facilitate the processing of ORC structures. Although children processed pre-verbal faster than post-verbal NPs, ORC structures with pre-verbal NPs received the lowest scores in the grammaticality judgment task. We discuss these findings on the grounds of Relativized Minimality ( Friedmann et al., 2009 ) and Fodor and Inoue’s (2000) Diagnosis and Repair Model.
The present study examines the production and interpretation of inalienable possession in dative constructions with body-part nouns in Spanish by 25 English-speaking L2 learners and 25 heritage speakers of Spanish born and raised in the United States. Twenty Spanish-dominant speakers served as baseline group. The results showed significant divergencies with inalienable NP s among the L2 learners compared to the heritage speakers and Spanish-dominant speakers. The L2 learners produced few instances of clitic se and a definite determiner and favored the use of a possessive determiner with or without a clitic instead. The heritage speakers and baseline group behaved similarly in their use of a clitic and a definite determiner. We argue for age of onset of acquisition and crosslinguistic influence effects in the acquisition of inalienable possession in Spanish.
This paper investigates the lexicalization of the complementizer that/que in English and Spanish varieties in different contexts along the left edge of the clause. This is performed through discussion of a range of constructions traditionally attributed to the CP domain/left periphery, primarily (but not only) in certain embedded clauses. The ubiquity of that/que, that is, the lexical realization of that/que in subordinating environments, exclamative clauses, interrogative contexts, and subjunctive clauses, amongst others, sheds light not only on the characterization of the relevant constructions but also on the make-up of the left edge of the clause. The fact that such realizations can be obligatory, optional, or, on occasion, impossible, sometimes depending on the variety in question, furthers our understanding of head lexicalizations while contributing to macro and microvariation studies in syntactic theory. In so doing, this paper paves the way for holistic investigations devoted to complementizer realization in the head position of different left-edge-related constructions and in different linguistic varieties.
This variationist study analyzes the first-person subject pronoun expression (SPE) of speakers from Quito, Ecuador. To date, this morphosyntactic variable has not been explored in this Andean variety of Spanish. The data consists of 20 sociolinguistic interviews. Results reveal an SPE rate of 17%, comparable to other Andean Spanish varieties. As per Rbrul’s quantitative analysis, the predictors that promote the presence of the ‘yo’ in this variety of Spanish are co-referential Priming, switch reference, ambiguous TMA endings and main clauses. In addition, following Orozco and Hurtado (2021) , lexical effects of the verb were observed by analyzing the verb lemma. This predictor revealed similarly opposing tendencies between verbs in the same lexical category. This study adds to the growing body of SPE research by examining which linguistic variables influence the use of ‘yo’ in this Ecuadorian Andean Spanish (EAS) variety and comparing these results to those of other Andean Spanish varieties.
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