Spanish subject personal pronoun use in New York City Puerto Ricans: Can we rest the case of English contact?

Abstract

The variable use of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) in null subject languages, though extensively researched in several Spanish dialects, is for the first time examined in a contact variety of Puerto Rican residents of New York City (NYC). In a large-scale study conducted by Flores-Ferrán (2002), a number of contradictions arose with regard to how the degree of exposure to NYC may mediate the influence of overt SPP use on speakers. The degree of exposure to NYC was considered as indirect contact with English. This article further analyzes how 41 Puerto Rican residents in NYC use overt SPPs, and it also describes the patterns of each group: the recent arrivals, established residents, and native-born NYC Puerto Ricans. Of the larger study, this article examines the verbs' person and number, switch reference, and exposure to NYC. A striking resemblance in the patterns of overt SPP use was found among NYC residents, as a group, when compared to those reported on the island (Ávila-Jiménez, 1995, 1996; Cameron, 1992). However, when considering years of exposure to the City, the NYC native-born group appeared to have the strongest tendency to use explicit SPPs. In spite of the fact that this distinction was found with the NYC native-born group, there remains little evidence in favor of an English contact hypothesis. This study has benefited from previous research conducted by Richard Cameron and Bárbara Ávila-Jiménez. I thank Richard for his insight, comments, and his continuous support throughout the years. I also express much gratitude to Ricardo Otheguy and Edward Bendix and the three anonymous reviewers whose sharp criticisms contributed to this work. All errors, of course, remain mine.

Language processing, acceptability, and statistical distribution: A study of null and overt subjects in Brazilian Portuguese

“…As argued and shown by Carminati (2002), these two types of anaphora are likely subject to different types of constraints and should therefore be studied separately. Nevertheless, the body of studies mentioned above, together with other research showing regional variability in preferences for null pronouns in different regional variants of Spanish (Cameron, 1992;Flores-Ferrá n, 2004), suggest that there may exist differences between languages in the likelihood of observing an OPP. Yang et al (1999) reported a study that did compare the processing of null and overt pronouns as inter-sentential anaphors with subject antecedents in Chinese, which is a typologically different language from the Romance languages discussed thus far.…”

Subject-verb word order in Spanish interrogatives

“…The aforementioned studies (Hochberg 1986;Cameron 1993;Morales 1997Morales , 2006Flores-Ferrán 2004) do not seem to specifically address direct wh-questions as we do in this current analysis. 10 In order to determine what may or may not favor the appearance of overt subjects in direct wh-questions, we submitted our data to a variable rule analysis using Varbrul (Rand & Sankoff 1990).…”

“…Varieties that demonstrate lack of inversion in questions are precisely those with high overt pronominal subject usage in general (e.g. Otheguy, Zentella & Livert 2007;Camacho (2008:419) for Dominican Spanish ;Hochberg 1986;Cameron 1993;Morales 1997;Flores-Ferrán (2004) for Puerto Rican Spanish). However, not all subjects are equally acceptable in non-inverted questions.…”

Frequency rates and constraints on subject personal pronoun expression: Findings from the Puerto Rican highlands

“…The difference of 15 percentage points separating overt expression for singular versus plural verbs is, nevertheless, much smaller in Castañer than for the other Puerto Rican samples, where the difference is in the 30-percentage-point range, and it is more in line with the differences between singulars and plurals reported for Castile. Castile (Rosengren, 1974) 21% 23,890 Madrid (Enríquez, 1984) 22% 22,357 Madrid (Cameron, 1992) 21% 2061 PR, San Juan (Morales, 1986) 46% 12,182 PR, San Juan (Cameron, 1992) 45% 2122 PR, San Juan (Ávila-Jiménez, 1996) 40% 4713 PR, Boston (Hochberg, 1986) 40% 3019 PR, New York City (Flores-Ferrán, 2004) 45% 15,617 PR, New York City 35% 3805 Castañer, Puerto Rico 28% 2882…”