In general Spanish, references to nonspecific third-person plurals are usually made by means of a verb occurring with the null form of the subject pronoun, as in llamaron del banco, rather than by means of a verb occurring with the overt form of the subject pronoun. In contrast to the position in this discussion, the literature presents null pronouns in these nonspecific 3pl contexts as resulting from a categorical syntactic rule, when in fact we consider that they are the result of a strong pragmatic constraint: overt ellos for nonspecific references are rare, not ungrammatical. That is, one occasionally does find in the Spanish of Latin America nonspecific 3pl NPs with overt subject pronouns, as in the disfavored but grammatical ellos llamaron del banco. This study, based on a large corpus of sociolinguistic interviews from the CUNY Project on the Spanish of New York, reveals that, among bilinguals in New York City whose exposure to English is intensive, such nonspecific ellos are even more frequent.
Three degrees of nonspecificity are recognized in the literature on 3pl nonspecific NPs. Among both contact and non-contact speakers, the use of overt nonspecific ellos increases as nonspecificity decreases, though the absolute numbers are much larger in New York. In this way, the contact dialect is a quantitatively enhanced copy of the qualitatively identical pre-contact variety. Since, as the evidence presented here shows, examples of overt nonspecific ellos are found in Spanish in Latin America, their appearance in Spanish in New York does not represent a radical change in the syntax of contact Spanish; instead, these usages are an example of the familiar situation where contact varieties expand usages that were already incipient in the pre-contact community. Thus, the study would appear to indicate that the use of overt nonspecific ellos in New York represents a quantitative change in the strength of a pragmatic constraint that guides the use of subject pronouns, not a qualitative change in a syntactic rule that governs their use.
2023. A Historical-Variationist Analysis of Subject Pronoun Expression in 19th and Early 20th Century Arizonan Spanish. Languages 8:1 ► pp. 25 ff.
Sharma, Devyani
2023. From Deficit to Dialect,
Limerick, Philip P.
2021. First-Person Plural Subject Pronoun Expression in Mexican Spanish Spoken in Georgia. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 14:2 ► pp. 411 ff.
Limerick, Philip P.
2024. Outlier speakers and apparent effects: The case of variable subject placement in Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism
Padilla, Lillie
2021. First person singular subject pronoun expression in Equatoguinean Spanish. Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 3:2
Aijón Oliva, Miguel A.
2020. Talking about ‘others’: Referential readings and pragmatic functions of non-phoric plural third persons in Spanish media discourse. Lingua 243 ► pp. 102906 ff.
Castro Correa, Ainoa
2020. Dejando el pasado atrás, adaptándose al futuro: escribas de transición y escribas poligráficos visigótica-carolina. Anuario de Estudios Medievales 50:2 ► pp. 631 ff.
Cerrón-Palomino, Álvaro
2019. Null-subject encounter: Variable subject pronoun expression in the Spanish of Quechua-Spanish bilinguals in the Central Peruvian Andes. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:5 ► pp. 1005 ff.
2018. Managing subjectivity: Omission and expression of first-person singular object a mí in Spanish media discourse. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 63:3 ► pp. 423 ff.
Koç, Didem Koban
2016. Social variables and Turkish subject pronoun use in New York City: The effect of language contact. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 52:3
2016. Subject-verb order variation with unaccusative verbs of change of location in Mexico and Southern Arizona. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 9:1 ► pp. 143 ff.
Nagy, Naomi
2015. A sociolinguistic view of null subjects and VOT in Toronto heritage languages. Lingua 164 ► pp. 309 ff.
2014. Grammatical complexification in Spanish in New York: 3sg pronoun expression and verbal ambiguity. Language Variation and Change 26:3 ► pp. 303 ff.
Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox & Eivind Torgersen
2011. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15:2 ► pp. 151 ff.
Koban, Didem
2011. Continuity of Reference and Subject Personal Pronoun Variation in the Turkish Spoken in Turkey and in New York City. Australian Journal of Linguistics 31:3 ► pp. 351 ff.
Otheguy, Ricardo & Nancy Stern
2011. On so-called Spanglish. International Journal of Bilingualism 15:1 ► pp. 85 ff.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Catherine E. Travis
2011. Testing convergence via code-switching: priming and the structure of variable subject expression. International Journal of Bilingualism 15:3 ► pp. 241 ff.
Valdés, Guadalupe & Michelle Geoffrion‐Vinci
2011. Heritage Language Students: The Case of Spanish. In The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, ► pp. 598 ff.
Livert, David & Ricardo Otheguy
2010. A multilevel statistical analysis of changes in language use among first-generation immigrants in a bilingual setting. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2010:203
Otheguy, Ricardo
2010. Advances in the study of lexical, phonological and grammatical variation and contact in Spanish in New York. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2010:203 ► pp. 1 ff.
Otheguy, Ricardo
2011. Functional Adaptation and Conceptual Convergence in the Analysis of Language Contact in the Spanish of Bilingual Communities in New York. In The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, ► pp. 504 ff.
OTHEGUY, RICARDO
2012. Concurrent models and cross-linguistic analogies in the study of prepositional stranding in French in Canada. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15:2 ► pp. 226 ff.
Flores-Ferrán, Nydia
2009. Are you referring to me? The variable use of UNO and YO in oral discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 41:9 ► pp. 1810 ff.
Flores‐Ferrán, Nydia
2007. A Bend in the Road: Subject Personal Pronoun Expression in Spanish after 30 Years of Sociolinguistic Research. Language and Linguistics Compass 1:6 ► pp. 624 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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