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Article published In: Sociolinguistic patterns and processes of convergence and divergence in Spanish
Edited by Isabel Molina Martos, Florentino Paredes García and Ana M. Cestero Mancera
[Spanish in Context 17:2] 2020
► pp. 294–316

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An approach to subject pronoun expression patterns in data from the “Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish in Spain and America”

 | El Colegio de México
Published online: 1 October 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.00060.mar
Abstract
The objective of this article is to extract certain general consequences about social and linguistic-pragmatic conditions in the expression of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) in contemporary urban Spanish. The study examines some of the results obtained in Valencia and Granada, Spain; Mexico City, Mexico; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Caracas, Venezuela; Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia; and Montevideo, Uruguay. These works have all analyzed data from the “Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish in Spain and America” (PRESEEA), thus they all share data collected under very similar circumstances (Moreno Fernández, Francisco. 1996. “Metodología del «Proyecto para el estudio sociolingüístico del Español de España y de América» (PRESEEA).” Lingüística 81: 257–287.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Cestero Mancera, Ana M. 2012. “El proyecto para el estudio sociolingüístico del español de España y América (PRESEEA).” Español Actual 981: 227–234.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The presence or the absence of pronominal subjects in Spanish is required in certain contexts, but in most cases they are considered optional. This optionality depends on fixed factors of linguistic nature (such as the grammatical person and number of the subject, or the co-reference between the subject and a previous element) and of social nature (such as age or gender), and on random factors (such as individuals and verbal pieces). The hypotheses to be tested are: (a) there is geographical variation among the cities studied, which is reflected in the rates of overt SPPs (Otheguy, Ricardo, and Ana C. Zentella. 2012. Spanish in New York. Language Contact, Dialectal Leveling, and Structural Continuity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Carvalho, Orozco & Shin 2015); (b) social variation is relatively small within each city; (c) the fixed and random linguistic-pragmatic variation is intense within each city and similar among cities; (d) the most relevant factors that activate overt SPPs are related to adequate information management of the anaphoric chains and textual coherence.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The study of SPPs in PRESEEA
  • 3.A comparative view: The geographic dimension
  • 4.Social factors
  • 5.Linguistic factors
  • 6.Towards a hierarchy of predictors
  • 7.Conclusions: SPPs in the PRESEEA Data
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (57)
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