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Project

Subject personal pronouns in Caribbean Spanish: The interplay of markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming.

In Spanish, speakers may refer to non-contrastive human-reference subjects with a combination of a subject personal pronoun (SPP) and the person-number ending of the verb (e.g., Yo trabajo I work) or only with the person-number ending (e.g., Trabajo [I] work). Earlier research has shown that the use of a SPP is more likely when the reference of the subject differs from that of the subject of the previous sentence, with first- and second-person subjects, with verbs that do not refer to physical actions, with certain verb tenses, and when the previous sentence has a pronominal subject. However, recent investigations suggest that these patterns may be skewed by SPP-verb collocations and frequent verbs. How SPP variation should be portrayed theoretically also remains largely unaddressed. With this project I intend to remedy these issues. Building on Cognitive Construction Grammar, I will investigate whether SPP variation amounts to a competition between two constructions: and . Cognitive Construction Grammar also predicts that three general cognitive constraints on the use of constructions (markedness of coding, statistical preemption, and structural priming) will condition the alternation. Drawing on sociolinguistic interviews with speakers of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Spanish and state-of-the-art statistical techniques, I will investigate these predictions, while also controlling for skewing by SPP- verb collocations and frequent verbs.

Date:1 Oct 2015 →  15 Oct 2016
Keywords:Caribbean Spanish, Cognitive Construction Grammar, Cognitive Sociolinguistics, markedness of coding, SPP variation, statistical preemption, structural priming, subject personal pronouns