A Bend in the Road: Subject Personal Pronoun Expression in Spanish after 30 Years of Sociolinguistic Research

Abstract

Scholars have investigated the variable use of subject personal pronouns (SPP) in oral and written discourse using a sociolinguistic framework for over three decades. The focal point of their research has been to determine the linguistic, stylistic, and social factors that influence speakers to express or not express the SPP as in Yo canto (I sing), and Canto [(I) sing]. Several linguistic, stylistic, and social factors have been found to condition the use of the expressed SPP. Nonetheless, this syntactic variable remains highly debated among scholars who investigate Spanish in the US, Latin American, and Peninsular varieties. The remarks in the article are suggestive rather than probative as the discussion represents an overview. It also provides a gateway of interest regarding this feature. Given the many empirical studies that have investigated this feature, the metaphor of ‘the bend in the road’ represents a slight turn that should guide our thoughts for future research.

Variable “subject” presence in Australian Sign Language and New Zealand Sign Language

“…The preference for pronominal expression of first-person-singular subjects in Auslan is perhaps surprising in light of the salience of the body as an implicit first-person subject in the verb structures of many signed languages (as argued by Meir et al, 2007). However, this finding is consistent with spoken languages that make extensive use of null subjects (Flores-Ferrán, 2007). The Auslan result that second-person subject strongly favors null subject may be partly the result of a disproportionately small number of tokens in this category (participants more frequently talked about themselves or third parties).…”

Recent Research on Latinos in the USA and Canada, Part 2: Spanish Varieties1

“…Variation between null and overt SPPs has long been a subject of investigation and debate in Spanish sociolinguistics and many studies have focused on US Spanish (see, e.g. Poplack 1980; Silva‐Corvalán 1982; Hochberg 1986; Bayley and Pease‐Alvarez 1997; Cameron and Flores‐Ferrán 2003; Flores‐Ferrán 2004, 2007a,b; Travis 2007). 6 SPPs are optional in Spanish, and thus are of particular interest to US Spanish researchers because of the opportunity to examine whether contact with English, which requires overt SPP realization, or with Spanish varieties with high SPP rates, leads US Spanish speakers to use overt SPPs at higher rates than Spanish speakers in other nations.…”

“…Reviewing the research on SPP expression in Spanish from the past 30 years, Flores‐Ferrán (2007a) points to new directions and still unanswered questions regarding the factors conditioning the overt realization of SPPs in Spanish. Degree of specificity is a factor of renewed interest in studies of SPP realization: ‘… speakers do not always use an SPP such as tú “you” to refer to the interlocutor in the oral discourse but rather to a generic [+human] entity, or to the general public, similar to the form “one” in English’ (Flores‐Ferrán 2007a:627).…”

“…Degree of specificity is a factor of renewed interest in studies of SPP realization: ‘… speakers do not always use an SPP such as tú “you” to refer to the interlocutor in the oral discourse but rather to a generic [+human] entity, or to the general public, similar to the form “one” in English’ (Flores‐Ferrán 2007a:627). Furthermore, debate continues as to whether greater overt SPP usage in the speech of long‐term immigrants as compared to recent immigrants is the result of contact with English or dialect contact with varieties having high overt SPP rates (Flores‐Ferrán 2007a; Otheguy et al. 2007).…”

Probabilistic Grammar: The view from Cognitive Sociolinguistics

“…While it is true that these predictors produce highly similar results for most monolingual and bilingual communities considered to date (see e.g., Flores-Ferrán 2007 andCarvalho et al 2015 for overviews), recent work suggests that they model only a small portion of the variability. For example, Otheguy & Zentella (2012) report that their models capture some 18% of the variance (R 2 = 0.18).…”