Structural priming refers to the process whereby the use of a syntactic structure in an utterance functions as a prime on a subsequent utterance, such that that same structure is repeated. This article investigates this phenomenon from the perspective of first-person singular subject expression in Spanish. Two dialects and two genres of spoken Spanish are studied: New Mexican narratives and Colombian Spanish conversation. An analysis of 2,000 verbs occurring with first-person singular subjects reveals that subject expression undergoes a priming effect in both data sets, but that the effect is more short-lived in the Colombian data. This is found to be attributable to the interactional nature of these data, showing that the need to deal with interactional concerns weakens the priming effect. As the first study to compare priming of subject expression across distinct genres, this article makes an important contribution to our understanding of this effect, and in particular, of factors that play a role in its maintenance or dissipation in discourse. Structural priming refers to the process whereby the use of a certain structure in one utterance functions as a prime on a subsequent utterance, such that that same structure is repeated. This phenomenon has been observed in experimental settings in psycholinguistic research (

In languages with variable subject expression, or “pro-drop” languages, when do speakers use subject pronouns? We address this question by investigating the linguistic conditioning of Spanish first-person singular pronoun yo in conversational data, testing hypotheses about speakers' choice of an expressed subject as factors in multivariate analysis. Our results indicate that, despite a widely held understanding of a contrastive role for subject pronouns, yo expression is primarily driven by cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors. In cognitive terms, we find that yo is favored in the presence of human subjects intervening between coreferential 1sg subjects (a refined measure of the well-described phenomenon of “switch-reference”). A mechanical effect is observed in two distinct manifestations of priming: the increased rate of yo when the previous coreferential first singular subject was realized as yo and when the subject of the immediately preceding clause was realized pronominally. And evidence for a particular yo + cognitive verb construction is provided by a speaker-turn effect, the favoring of yo in a turn-initial Intonation Unit, that is observed with cognitive (but not other) verbs, which form a category centered around high frequency yo creo ‘I think’.

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In this study, we test the hypothesis that code-switching promotes grammatical convergence by investigating Spanish first-person singular subject ( yo ‘I’) expression in bilingual conversations of New Mexican speakers of Spanish and English. We find that variable yo expression in New Mexican Spanish follows the same grammatical patterning as has been identified for non-contact varieties, and that this is the case regardless of the degree of bilingualism of the speakers. We observe a slightly higher rate of subject expression in the presence of code-switching; however, this is found to be attributable not to the code-switching per se, but to the presence of an English expressed first-person singular subject ( I) in the preceding discourse. We interpret this as a cross-linguistic priming effect, and note that the presence of I increases the proportion of first singular subjects that occur in the context where the previous coreferential subject was expressed (be that Spanish yo or English I), an environment that favors yo expression. We conclude that, despite prolonged contact, the data do not support Spanish convergence with English in this variety, nor code-switching as a mechanism of language change. Instead, multivariate analyses indicate that cross-linguistic priming may play a role in ostensible contact-induced change by modestly raising the rate of a superficially similar construction, without accompanying changes in language-particular grammatical patterns.

In the current paper we report on a study of