Perseveration of subject expression across regional dialects of Spanish

Abstract

Models of communication strictly as a function of intention and controlfounder when confronted by variationist findings of perseveration at different levels of linguistic structure in use. When Poplack (1981) finds that Spanish [s] leads to more [s] and that "zeros lead to zeros," it is unclear how speaker intention is involved. But, it is clear that what a speaker says at one point will influence what this same speaker says next. Here we identify perseveration of pronominal and null subjects in three dialects of Spanish: Madrid, San Juan, and New York City. In null subject Spanish, expression of subject pronouns leads to more pronouns, and expression of null subjects leads to more nulls. We argue that a perspicuous account of perseveration may be found within Spreading-Activation Theory (Dell 1986), a psycholinguistic theory of production based on speech errors. Thus, this work integrates quantitative dialect description with psycholinguistic explanation.

Subject-verb word order in Spanish interrogatives

“…The notion that overt subjects yield more overts and nulls breed more nulls has been highlighted in other studies (Cameron and Flores-Ferrán 2004). In our analysis, we find that when there is an overt subject in the preceding clause, overt subjects are favored (factor weight .56), and conversely when the preceding subject is null, the target subject tends to be null.…”

“…i) verb in the previous one or two clauses: Cameron and Flores-Ferrán (2004) found that with increased similarity between clauses, greater was the influence of the perseveration effect. In order to examine this in our data, we coded the conjugated verb in preceding clauses as 'same as the verb expressed in the wh-clause' or 'different from the one in the wh-clause'.…”

“…Perseveration (also known as priming, persistence, perseverance and bird-of-a-feather effect) is a psycholinguistic phenomenon that entails the repetition of a linguistic form due to its occurrence in the immediately preceding contexts. Cameron and Flores-Ferrán (2004) show that the occurrence of overt pronominal subjects triggers the use of more pronominal subjects, whereas null subjects lead to the use of more null subjects. Given the clear perseveration of form and meaning, we hypothesized that we could find evidence of perseveration of word order.…”

“…In order to test this, in our analysis of wh-questions, we considered linguistic variables derived from Cameron and Flores-Ferrán (2004): subject expression, word order, form of the subject, verb type in the immediately preceding context (at a distance of one or two clauses) and switch in reference. Consequently, all examples were also coded according to the following variables: f) subject expression in the previous one or two clauses: We identified the conjugated verb that most immediately or closely preceded the question and coded the subject as 'overt' or 'null'.…”

Perspectives in the Study of Spanish Language Variation: Papers in Honor of Carmen Silva-Corvalán

“…In Spanish phonology, perseveration has been argued to be a predictor of, for example, the choice between the presence of coda /-s/ (realized as [-s] or [-h]) and its absence (often indicated by a zero [-0] , Terrell 1981 In Spanish morphosyntax, evidence has been offered for regarding perseveration as a predictor of the choice between presence of a subject personal pronoun (e.g., ella canta 'she sings') and its absence (e.g., canta 'she sings') (see, among others, Cameron 1994, Cameron andFlores-Ferrán 2004). Perseveration is said to occur when the deployment of a pronoun in the first verb of a sequence leads to relatively more deployment in the next 376 pErSpECTiVES iN ThE STUdy OF SpANiSh LANgUAgE VAriATiON verb (e.g., ella canta pero yo no bailo 'she sings but I don't dance'), and when the omission of a pronoun in the first verb leads to relatively more omission in the next (e.g., canta pero no bailo).…”