A variationist study of relative clauses in Spanish.

摘要

This dissertation examines correlations between the grammar of Spanish relative clauses, semantic/pragmatic factors such as humanness, definiteness, information status of noun phrases, the functional role of relative clauses, and social factors. I follow in part Fox & Thompson's (1990) study of the grammar of relative clauses in English, but include a wider range of syntactic possibilities involved in relativization in Spanish. The correlation with social variables is examined with respect to the use of restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses and the variable use of prepositions with a relativizer. The use of a preposition with a relativizer is analyzed across various types of registers in the speech of 98 individuals from Mexico City and from the southwestern United States. The data are analyzed by submitting them to some of the programs in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The results highlight the importance of a variationist approach that includes semantic/pragmatic, discourse and social factors in the investigation of grammatical variation.