Person marking in the wake of /s/ deletion in Andalusian Spanish

Abstract

Data on person marking in Andalusian Spanish argue in favor of a revision of the functional hypothesis, which pertains to "the tendency for semantically relevant information to be retained in surface structure" (Kiparsky, 1982:87). The first part of this study shows that subject pronouns in Andalusian are not used to disambiguate verb forms, in direct contrast to Hochberg's (1986) findings on subject pronoun usage in Puerto Rican. In the second part of the study, an analysis of contextual person markers, not undertaken in previous studies, shows that person can be indicated by means outside the surface structure. When both linguistic and contextual person markers are taken into account, only 2% of the 1,035 verbs in this sample of Andalusian are unmarked for person. Person marking is thus maintained where it is important to the speaker's message, but it is not limited to surface structure realization as the strong form of the functional hypothesis suggests.Person in Spanish is typically indicated on the surface by an obligatory verbal suffix, such as the -a of canta 'he, she, you (polite) sings', and optionally by the grammatical subject, whether a pronoun, as in el canta 'he sings', or a noun phrase, el hombre canta 'the man sings'. Because the subject pronoun is not obligatory in Spanish, the speaker has the option of adding a noun phrase or subject pronoun in order to make person explicit when the verb is ambiguous, as is the case of cantaba 'I, he, she, you (polite) was singing', which could have the subject yo T, el 'he', ella 'she', Ud. 'you (polite)', or any third person singular noun. In Spanish dialects in which word-final /s/ is deleted variably, such as Andalusian Spanish, the subject of the present study, ambiguity of the verb alone is even greater, because the second person singular becomes identical to the third person singular in all forms except those of the preterite, the imperative, and the present tense of the verb ser. Such /s/-deleting dialects therefore provide a testing ground for the functional hypothesis-which states that "there is a tendency for semantically A Sarah B. Moss Fellowship from the University of Georgia funded the fieldwork for this project. I especially thank William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. for his assistance in testing the data for statistical significance and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. I am also indebted to Juan Hernandez and Carmen Ramos L6pez for transcribing the recordings of the interviews and, of course, to my informants for their hospitality and cooperation. 133

Variation at the Interfaces in Ibero-Romance. Catalan and Spanish Prosody and Word Order

“…As in the case of Caribbean Spanish, this deletion makes that second and third persons singular become identical in most of forms. Ranson (1991) carried out an analysis of contextual personal markers aiming to test whether subject pronouns in Andalusian Spanish were used to resolve the ambiguity in verb forms. Contrary to what was found by Hochberg (1986) with respect to Puerto Rican Spanish, the results reveal that Andalusian Spanish shows no increased use of subject pronouns 8.…”

“…Yet, according to Ranson (1991), resolving ambiguity in the verb form is not the only function of subject pronouns in Spanish (Bentivoglio 1983, D'Introno 1989, Silva-Corvalán 1982. In any case, against traditional belief (Lipski and others), in our data the percentage of pronominal subject drop is not particularly low in en can_spa.…”

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

“…A number of studies that have discussed this relationship questioned whether there was a correlation between SPP expression and the absence of inflectional endings in the verb, characteristic of Caribbean and Andalusian Spanish dialects (i.e. Poplack 1979; Hochberg 1986; Ranson 1991; Cameron 1992, 1993, 1996). For example, if we omit the inflectional ending ‐s of 2nd person singular verbs such as tú toma ‘you drink’, we produce a verb form also used with 3rd person singular él/ella: toma .…”

A community-based test of a linguistic hypothesis

“…1 Functional hypotheses have also been explored in detail, as they apply to plural marking via word-final -5 in plural noun phrases of Andalusian Spanish, by Ranson 1992Ranson , 1993, and in Puerto Rican Spanish by Poplack 1979Poplack , 1980aPoplack ,b, 1981. I do not explore functional effects in plural noun phrases here.…”