Cover not available
Part of
Functionalist and Usage-based Approaches to the Study of Language: In honor of Joan L. Bybee
Edited by K. Aaron Smith and Dawn Nordquist
[Studies in Language Companion Series 192] 2018
► pp. 89–106

Traces of demonstrative grammaticalization in Spanish variable subject expression

ella ‘she’ vs. él ‘he’

| Penn State University

Third person subject pronouns are widely hypothesized to arise from the grammaticalization of demonstratives. Analysis of variation between pronominal and unexpressed subjects in 13th–16th century Spanish texts (N = 1,947) reveals that subjects referring to women favored pronominal expression and were more sensitive to the syntactic role of the previous mention. The data distribution shows that feminine referents were less topical, or more deictically distant: they occurred less frequently than masculine ones as subjects, and their previous mention was more likely to have been in non-subject role – a particularly favorable environment for pronoun ella ‘she’. Thus, as a vestige of demonstrative origins, variable subject pronoun use could express topicality. An intermediate stage of demonstrative > pronoun grammaticalization may be use of the pronoun for unexpected subjects.

Article outline
  • 1.Variation as a window into grammaticalization
  • 2.Data
  • 3.Operationalizing deictic function and other motivations for the use of subject pronouns
  • 4.Linguistic conditioning of subject pronouns in early Spanish texts
  • 5.The intersection of referent gender and syntactic role of previous mention
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpus
  • References
Published online: 1 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.192.04tor
References

Corpus

[Calila], Anonymous
1984, Calila et Dimna. Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua & María Jesús Lacarra (eds). Madrid: Castalia.Google Scholar
[Lucanor], Don Juan Manuel
1969, El conde Lucanor o Libro de los enxiemplos del conde Lucanor et de Petronio. J. M. Blecua (ed.), Madrid: Castalia.Google Scholar
[Celestina], Fernando de Rojas
1993, La Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. Dorothy S. Severin (ed.), Madrid: Cátedra.Google Scholar
[Lazarillo], Anonymous
1995, La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades. The Project Gutenberg Etext, prepared by Jesús Joglar.Google Scholar
Audring, Jenny
2006 Pronominal gender in spoken Dutch. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 18(2): 85–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benevento, Nicole, & Dietrich, Amelia
2015 I think, therefore digo yo: Variable position of the 1sg subject pronoun in New Mexican Spanish-English code-switching. International Journal of Bilingualism 19(4):407–422. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. Kathryn & Warren, Richard K.
1985 Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation. Cognition 21:47–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan
2010 Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 Language Change. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan & Pagliuca, William
1987: The evolution of future meaning. In Papers from the seventh International Conference on Historical Linguistics [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 48], Anna Giacalone Ramat, Onofrio Carruba & Giuliano Bernini (eds), 109–122. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan, Perkins, Revere & Pagliuca, William
1994 The evolution of grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago IL: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Cameron, Richard
1992 Pronominal and Null Subject Variation in Spanish: Constraints, Dialects, and Functional Compensation. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA.Google Scholar
1993 Ambiguous agreement, functional compensation, and nonspecific tú in the Spanish of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Madrid, Spain. Language Variation and Change 5(3): 305–334. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1994 Switch reference, verb class and priming in a variable syntax. In Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Parasession on Variation in Linguistic Theory, Vol. 2, Katherine Beals, Jeannette Denton, Robert Knippen, Lynette Melnar & Hisami Suzuki (eds), 27–45. Chicago IL: CLS.Google Scholar
1995 The scope and limits of switch reference as a constraint on pronominal subject expression. Hispanic Linguistics 6–7: 1–27.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
1981[1993] Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures, 7th edn. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard
1989 Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 2nd edn. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Delancey, Scott
1981 An interpretation of split ergativity and related patterns. Language 57(3): 626–657. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eddington, David
2002 Spanish gender assignment in an analogical framework. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 9: 49–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enríquez, Emilia V.
1984 El pronombre personal sujeto en la lengua española hablada en Madrid. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Miguel de Cervantes.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy
1975 Serial verbs and syntactic change: Niger-Congo. In Word Order and Word Order Change, Charles N. Li (ed.), 47–112. Austin TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
1979 On Understanding Grammar. New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
1983 Topic continuity in discourse: An introduction. In Topic Continuity in Discourse: A Quantitative Cross-linguistic Study, T. Givón (ed.), 1–41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy
1984 Syntax. A functional-typological introduction, Vol I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greenough, J. B., Kittredge, G. L., Howard, A. A. & D’ooge, Benj. L.
1903 Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. Boston MA: The Athenaeum Press, Ginn & Company.Google Scholar
Haiman, John & Munro, Pamela
1983 Introduction. In Switch Reference and Universal Grammar [Typological Studies in Language 2]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd & Reh, Mechtild
1984 Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages. Hamburg: Helmut Buske.Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania
2002 World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd & Song, Kyung-An
2011 On the grammaticalization of personal pronouns. Journal of Linguistics 47(3): 587–630. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmquist, Jonathan
2012 Frequency rates and constraints on subject personal pronoun expression: Findings from the Puerto Rican highlands. Language Variation and Change 24(2): 203–220. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul J.
1991 On some principles of grammaticization. In Approaches to grammaticalization, Vol. 1, Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), 17–35. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klein-Andreu, Flora
1992 Understanding standards. In Explanation in Historical Linguistics, G. W. Davis and G. K. Iverson (eds.) [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 84], 167–178. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lamiroy, Béatrice & De Mulder, Walter
2011 Degrees of grammaticalization across languages. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, Heiko Narrog & Bernd Heine (eds), 302–317. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Lastra, Yolanda & Butragueño, Pedro Martín
2015 Subject pronoun expression in oral Mexican Spanish. In Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-dialectal Perspective, Ana M. Carvalho, Rafael Orozco & Naomi Lapidus Shin (eds), 39–57. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Lehmann, Christian
2002[1982] Thoughts on Grammaticalization, 2nd rev. edn. Erfurt: Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität. [URL]
Luraghi, Silvia
2011 The origin of the Proto-Indo-European gender system: Typological considerations. Folia Linguistica 45(2): 435–464. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Myhill, John
2005 Quantitative methods of discourse analysis. In Quantitive Linguistik: Ein internationales Handbuch, Reinhard Köhler, Gabriel Altmann & Raimond Gerikhovich Piotrowski (eds), 471–497. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Penny, Ralph
2002 A history of the Spanish language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sankoff, David
1988 Variable rules. In Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Vol. 2, Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar & Klaus J. Mattheier (eds), 984–997. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David, Tagliamonte, Sali & Smith, Eric
2012 Goldvarb LION: A variable rule application for Macintosh, University of Toronto. [URL]
Schwenter, Scott A. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena
2014 Competing constraints on the variable placement of direct object clitics in Mexico City Spanish. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 27(2): 514–536. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen
1994 Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. Forthcoming
2018 Bilingualism in the Community: Code Switching and Grammars in Contact. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, Berry, Grant, Champi, Chris, Perotti, Lauren & Ramos, Miguel
2014 Early conditioning of Spanish variable subject expression. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 43, Chicago, 23–26 October.
Travis, Catherine E.
2007 Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19(2):101–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Travis, Catherine E. & Lindstrom, Amy M.
2016 Different registers, different grammars? Subject expression in English conversation and narrative. Language Variation and Change 28(1):103–128. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van der Wel, Robrecht P. R. D., Fleckenstein, Robin M., Jax, Steven A. & Rosenbaum, David A.
2007 Hand path priming in manual obstacle avoidance: Evidence for abstract spatiotemporal forms in human motor control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 33(5):1117–1126.Google Scholar