Morphosyntactic variation and gender agreement in three Afro-Andean dialects

Gender Agreement in Online Versus Classroom Students of First-Semester Spanish

“…In their vernaculars, certain structures yield a higher rate of gender agreement than others, which produces the following hierarchy of the agreeing words: 1) definite articles and demonstratives; 2) weak quantifiers and indefinite articles; 3) pre-nominal adjectives; 4) strong quantifiers; 5) post-nominal adjectives (Gutiérrez-Rexach, and Sessarego 2014;Sessarego 2014;Sessarego, and Gutiérrez-Rexach, 2011). Example (5) shows agreement in the definite article, the first in the ranking, but lack of agreement in the strong quantifier and the post-nominal adjective, the lowest ranked.…”

“…Table 6 excludes the results from other factors, showing only those comparable with Afro-Hispanic vernaculars. Table 7 summarizes the hierarchy found in the Beginning Spanish data compared to Afro-Hispanic vernaculars as in Gutiérrez-Rexach, and Sessarego (2014), Sessarego (2014), and Sessarego, and Gutiérrez-Rexach (2011). The most important finding summarized in Table 7 is that classroom students behave more similarly to Afro-Hispanic speakers.…”

“…Afro-Hispanic vernaculars show a ranking of agreeing words that yield higher rates of accurate gender agreement: 1) definite articles and demonstratives; 2) quantifiers and indefinite articles; 3) pre-nominal adjectives; 4) pre-determiner quantifiers such as todo [all]; 5) postnominal adjectives (Gutiérrez-Rexach, and Sessarego 2014;Sessarego 2014;Sessarego, and Gutiérrez-Rexach 2011). It is possible that classroom students show a similar ranking since they have learned Spanish mostly through conversation, which better resembles naturalistic acquisition of ancient African L2 speakers.…”

Afro-Peruvian Spanish

“…( 30 Gender agreement Another phenomenon commonly encountered in Afro-Peruvian Spanish is variable gender agreement. After carrying out grammatical judgments on a sample of twelve informants, three different gender agreement patterns were attested (Groups A, B, C) (see Gutiérrez-Rexach & Sessarego 2014). Group A (2 elderly speakers) had grammatical intuitions that can be exemplified in (31), where gender agreement affects all the categories but strong quantifiers.…”

“…As can be noted, even though the tokens had to be recoded to obtain significant results with Varbrul, the evolutionary agreement trend of APS appears to follow the hierarchical steps depicted in (34), which parallels those found in previous studies for Afro-Bolivian Spanish and Chota Valley Spanish (cf. Gutiérrez-Rexach & Sessarego 2014). The examples in ( 35)-( 38) provide a sample of naturalistic data extracted from the sociolinguistic interviews presenting instances of variable gender agreement.…”