Chapter 9
The variable use of first-person-singular subject forms during an
academic year abroad
The goal of the current study was to investigate
the variable use and development of first-person-singular subject
forms in additional-language Spanish before and at the end of an
academic year in Spain. Our data came from the LANGSNAP corpus (
http://langsnap.soton.ac.uk). We examined oral
semi-guided interviews from 16 participants. We coded all contexts
of first-person-singular subject forms, either the personal pronoun
yo or an unexpressed subject
(
K = 3,571), for 11 independent variables. Our
mixed-effects model showed that a range of linguistic factors
(polarity, clause type, referent continuity, and perseveration) and
individual characteristics (engagement with English and placement
type) impacted the variable use of first-person-singular subjects
and that the use of these subject forms changed over the course of
an academic year in Spain.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Background
- Sociolinguistic variation
- Subject expression in Spanish
- The current study
- Method
- Corpus
- Data coding and analysis
- Results
- Discussion
- Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
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