Pragmatic and cultural aspects of an emergent language variety: The construction of Catalan Spanish deictic expressions.

摘要

This dissertation focuses on pragmatic aspects of Catalan-influenced Spanish in Barcelona, Spain. In Catalan, deictic verbs of motion, demonstratives, and locatives are similar in form but different in scope from the corresponding deictics in Spanish. The Catalan deictics include the location of the addressee, whereas the Spanish deictics do not; however, many bilinguals take the addressee into account in their use of the Spanish deictics, transferring usage rules from Catalan to Spanish. This study examines linguistic and extralinguistic motivations for this innovative usage.; Speakers from two social networks were identified and interviewed individually (N = 58) to provide comparable linguistic data and background information. Analysis demonstrated that the transfer associated with the innovative use of the Spanish deictics was not entirely predictable from the structure and lexicon of deictic systems in both languages. It was concluded that the transfer occurred in the pragmatic scope underlying the deictics examined. Sociolinguistic correlations between the linguistic data and two extralinguistic variables revealed that (a) as relative exposure to Catalan increased, so did the amount of innovative usage observed, and (b) integration into a pro-Catalanist ideological network did not affect such usage.; The innovative usage was analyzed as a simplification of the deictic system in "Catalan Spanish," resulting from pragmatic transfer. Motion verbs, demonstratives, and locatives were argued to be just one potential site of such transfer, especially permeable because of (a) their differing pragmatic scope in Catalan and Spanish, (b) their strong grounding in idiosyncratic perceptions of the physical world, and (c) their split informational load as deictic and nondeictic. The simplified system of deictics was presented as a linguistic resource representing the symbolic capital associated with Catalan identity in the social and linguistic markets that interact with expressions of Catalan habitus.; Contributions of the investigation include (a) the scholarly recognition of the existence of Catalan Spanish, (b) the demonstration of pragmatic permeability and transfer as distinctive, socially significant aspects of this variety, and (c) the development of a new methodological tool for analysis where bilinguals are concerned.