Variable subject pronoun expression revisited: This is what the Paisas do

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.5006

Keywords:

subject pronoun expression (SPE), sociolinguistics, language variation, Latin American Spanish, Colombian Spanish, lexical effects

Abstract

We explore subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Medellín, Colombia using 4,623 tokens to test eight predictors. The 28% overall pronominal rate found is significantly higher than those in other mainland communities. Grammatical person exerts the greatest conditioning effect, with uno ‘one’ strongly favoring overt subjects. Findings for verb class reveal that speech and cognitive verbs promote overt subjects. However, our in-depth analysis unveils opposing tendencies between different pronominal subject + verb collocations for the same verb. E.g., whereas (yo) soy ‘I am’ strongly favors overt subjects, (ellos) son ‘they are’ favors null subjects. These findings suggest that analyses focusing on infinitives do not constitute the most accurate way to explore verb effects on SPE. Moreover, the effect of age reveals a low pronominal rate among the youngest speakers, a finding that appears to have cognitive and acquisitional implications, as younger speakers would be expected to have higher pronominal rates. In general, this study contributes to expand our knowledge of SPE. Further, the findings regarding age and the lexical effect of the verb open promising research paths.

Author Biographies

  • Rafael Orozco, Louisiana State University

    Rafael Orozco is Professor of Linguistics and Spanish at Louisiana State University. Scholarly interests include sociolinguistics with emphases on language variation and change in Latin American Spanish, and Spanish in the United States. His research studies the factors that condition language variation including the effects of language and dialectal contact on Latin American Spanish. Recent work explores lexical effects on language variation. Author of Spanish in Colombia & New York City: Language Contact Meets Dialectal Convergence (John Benjamins, 2018); coeditor of Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-Dialectal Perspective (Georgetown, 2015). His work has appeared in several edited collections and in journals such as Hispania, Languages, Lingüística, and Spanish in Context.

  • Luz Marcela Hurtado, Central Michigan University

    Luz Marcela Hurtado is Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Central Michigan University (M.A. Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Colombia, 1995; Ph.D. University of Florida, 2001). She has published articles and presented at national and international conferences in the areas of Spanish in the U.S., language variation and change, and second language acquisition. Her work focuses on sociolinguistic variation in Colombian Spanish and has been published in journals such as the Modern Language Journal, Hispania, Languages, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, Litterae, Anuario de Letras, as well as in edited collections.

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Published

2021-03-20

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 1 (2021): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

License

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Orozco, Rafael, and Luz Marcela Hurtado. 2021. “Variable Subject Pronoun Expression Revisited: This Is What the Paisas Do”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 6 (1): 713–727. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.5006.