A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of subject pronoun placement in Spanish in New York.

摘要

This dissertation presents a variationist sociolinguistic study of the variable placement of subject personal pronouns before or after verbs in Spanish in New York City (e.g. ella canta; canta ella, both 'she sings'). It pursues a line of inquiry that partially replicates recent work by Otheguy & Zentella (2012). The research addresses, on the basis of a different morphosyntactic phenomenon, the same question of whether bilingualism in NYC is giving rise to language contact phenomena under which patterns of English usage are affecting the use of Spanish. In addition, this project expands the original database extracted from the Otheguy-Zentella corpus to include not only finite verbs but also non-finites, and it expands as well the tools of the analysis by introducing additional linguistic predictor variables.;This project will demonstrate that, with respect to the feature under study, there are indeed two distinct groups of newcomers entering the City, those from the Caribbean and those from the Latin American Mainland. It will also show that while continuity with Latin American ways of speaking remains the strongest force shaping Spanish in NYC, changes in the internal grammar of the speakers begin with slight force in the first generation and continue in the second.;On the basis of extensive internal evidence, this project advances our knowledge of variables conditioning the placement of subject pronouns. It is shown that the influencing variables for Mainlanders coincide for the most part with those for Caribbeans; that the speech of Caribbeans is not as rigidly set on an SVO word order as it has been claimed in the literature; and that the speech of Mainlanders is more set on an SVO order as well, rather than on the required VSO word order claimed by several authors in the literature.;Lastly, the study demonstrates that the linguistic variables constraining pronoun placement in the speech of newcomers begin to change in significance and hierarchy in the first generation with more exposure to the City, and become insignificant for the second generation of speakers.