Social class and gender impacting change in bilingual settings: Spanish subject pronoun use in New York

Shin, Naomi Lapidus; Otheguy, Ricardo

doi:10.1017/s0047404513000468

Cited by 44 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Since Roswell speakers use Spanish most of the time and are primarily in contact with Spanish-speakers who also have limited exposure to English, their SP rates and usage patterns are generally maintained. This is consistent with what has been found for other U.S. varieties with tight-knit social networks and limited exposure to English (Shin & Otheguy 2013;Shin & Van Buren 2016). Moreover, the differences in SP usage observed in the current data, rather than having their root in bilingualism and English contact, point toward a reflection of dialectal variation and dialect contact.…”

Section: The Role Of English/bilingualismsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…Roswell speakers demonstrated an SP rate of 27%, which slightly diverges from most monolingual Mexican varieties. For instance, the rate found for Mexico City was 22% (Lastra & Martin Butragueno 2015) and the rate for NYC newcomers was 19% (Shin & Otheguy 2013). As stated above, however, 27% is still within the general dialectal range for Mexican Spanish; it is a relatively low pronoun rate when compared to other regional varieties, which is characteristic of Mexican Spanish.…”

Section: Sp Rate Comparisonsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Silva-Corvalán 1994a; Flores-Ferrán 2004;Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2010;Limerick 2017). The reason for this discrepancy has been explained in terms of differential social classes and social networks (Shin & Otheguy 2013;Shin & Van Buren 2016). Specifically, Shin and Otheguy's (2013) analysis of different nationality groups in NYC Spanish revealed that more affluent speakers, who tend to have looser social networks (Cubans and Colombians), had higher SP rates than less affluent speakers with more dense social networks (Mexicans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans).…”

Section: Pronoun Use and English Contactmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Subject expression in a Southeastern U.S. Mexican community

Limerick¹

2019

Borealis

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Through an analysis of immigrant Spanish in Georgia, potential contact-induced language change is investigated through the lens of subject pronoun expression. Pronoun variation among Mexican speakers is examined using sociolinguistic interview data. Tokens of subject pronouns (N = 4,649) were coded for linguistic variables previously shown to constrain subject expression (e.g. person/number, tense-mood-aspect [TMA], polarity) as well as social variables (e.g. English proficiency, age), and then analysed using multivariate analyses in Rbrul. Results indicate an overall pronoun rate of 27%, which is slightly higher than what has been reported for monolingual Mexican Spanish. Several linguistic variables (e.g. person/number, switch-reference, morphological ambiguity, polarity) and one social variable (age) played a significant role in pronoun variation. Moreover, differential effects were revealed when compared to monolingual Mexican Spanish for variables such as TMA. These findings point in the direction of dialect contact influences and the presence of a unique variety of Mexican Spanish in the U.S.

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Section: The Role Of English/bilingualismsupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Sp Rate Comparisonsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Pronoun Use and English Contactmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Subject expression in a Southeastern U.S. Mexican community

Limerick¹

2019

Borealis

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“…After all, it is well known that the use of different languages result in different cognitive mechanisms in the people who use them 14,15 . Moreover, languages are often powerful symbols of social categories as age 16 , ethnicity 17 , gender 18,19 and social class 19 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relationship between ideology and language in the Catalan independence context

Atienza-Barthelemy

Martin-Gutierrez

Losada

et al. 2019

Sci Rep

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Political polarization generates strong effects on society, driving controversial debates and influencing the institutions. Territorial disputes are one of the most important polarized scenarios and have been consistently related to the use of language. In this work, we analyzed the opinion and language distributions of a particular territorial dispute around the independence of Catalonia through Twitter data. We infer a continuous opinion distribution by applying a model based on retweet interactions, previously detecting elite users with fixed and antagonist opinions. The resulting distribution presents a mainly bimodal behavior with an intermediate third pole that shows a less polarized society with the presence of not only antagonist opinions. We find that the more active, engaged and influential users hold more extreme positions. Also we prove that there is a clear relationship between political positions and the use of language, showing that against independence users speak mainly Spanish while pro-independence users speak Catalan and Spanish almost indistinctly. However, the third pole, closer in political opinion to the pro-independence pole, behaves similarly to the against-independence one concerning the use of language.

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“…Alfaraz 2015:10, Orozco 2015:30). Shin and Otheguy (2013) observe that women lead the ongoing change in the increasing use of subject pronouns in a contact situation between Spanish and English. There is also some evidence to the effect that speakers' age and gender correlate with the choice of grammatical subjects in discourse (Posio 2016) which in turn may have implications on the rates of expressed subject pronouns per speaker.…”

Section: Sociolinguistic Factorsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Properties of Pronominal Subjects

Posio¹

The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics

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The expression and omission of subject personal pronouns-often exemplified by the 1. Introduction: variable expression of pronominal subjects The variable use of subject personal pronouns is among the most widely studied features of Spanish syntax. Pronominal subjects can be expressed by a subject pronoun placed before the verb (example 1a), after the verb (1b) or left unexpressed (1c). 1a. Y yo creo que eso es sano. 'And I think that it is healthy.' b. No creo yo que mañana tengamos reunión. 'I don't think that we have meeting tomorrow.' c. Pues creo que no lo sabía. 'Well I think that he didn't know it.' (CREA) This property distinguishes Spanish from English and some other Western European languages like German and French that have obligatory pronominal subjects. Languages resembling Spanish are frequently referred to as null subject or pro-drop languages. Both terms originate in the Principles and Parameters version of Generative Grammar (see Chapter 1) where the term pro-drop is used of a cluster of syntactic properties including null subjects and "free" constituent order (Chomsky 1981). These terms are widely used in linguistics, although conceptualizing the lack of independent subject personal pronouns as "dropping" or as "null" arguments has also been criticized as linguistic Anglo-centrism (Dryer 2011). In more functionally oriented studies, the term "variable subject expression" has been used instead to better account for the complex nature of the phenomenon (see e.g. Otheguy and Zentella 2012; Travis and Torres Cacoullos 2012; Carvalho, Orozco and Shin 2015). Spanish subject pronoun expression is a textbook example of variable syntax, and exploring what factors condition subject pronoun expression has become a popular topic in studies using variationist sociolinguistic methodology. The first task in variationist studies is to determine the envelope of variation, i.e. the contexts where variation may occur. For example, syntactically impersonal verbs such as meteorological verbs (e.g. llueve 'it rains') and existential verbs (e.g. hay 'there is/are') are excluded from the envelope of variation, as they do not admit pronominal subjects, with the exception of Dominican Spanish where the neuter personal pronoun ello may be

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Social class and gender impacting change in bilingual settings: Spanish subject pronoun use in New York

Cited by 44 publications

References 34 publications

Subject expression in a Southeastern U.S. Mexican community

Subject expression in a Southeastern U.S. Mexican community

Relationship between ideology and language in the Catalan independence context

Properties of Pronominal Subjects

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