Spanish in Context - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2015

Although previous research has focused on working class immigrants, currently, one out of every nine immigrants from Mexico derives from its university-educated class of individuals, known as profesionistas. Profesionistas’ enhanced cultural capital allows for greater mobility in terms of housing, travel and personal contacts beyond U.S. Spanish-speaking communities as compared to traditional working class immigrants from Mexico. Nonetheless, these same conditions are ripe to promote a shift to English for their families. The present study examines the values held by women profesionistas regarding Spanish and English and their use of both languages within their households. The findings reveal that, in contrast to previous studies of Spanish-speaking communities, Spanish is held in equal esteem with English and profesionista informants aspire for their children to cultivate equally strong skills in both languages and make efforts to guide their children’s development of Spanish.

This article is a contribution to the study of subject resumptive pronouns (RPs) in Spanish relative clauses (RCs). Previous studies have focused only on the constraints governing RPs across the different functions relativized: subject, direct object and oblique. In this variationist study, two analyses were conducted for the Peruvian Limeño variety: on the one hand, RPs were analyzed as a whole, following the aforementioned tradition; on the other hand, subject RPs were studied separately. When comparing the results of both analyses, it was found that the constraints favoring subject RPs are only a subset of the ones governing RPs as a whole, and the ranking of these constraints is also different. In addition, upon closer inspection, a different type of non-standard subject pronoun was identified: a contrastive one.

La presente investigación compara el uso de dos construcciones impersonales con referencia humana (CIRH) –construcciones con se y la tercera persona del plural– en dos corpus orales de español peninsular, uno de conversaciones familiares y otro de medios de comunicación. El objetivo es averiguar hasta qué punto el uso de estas dos construcciones está diferenciado, si hay contextos donde su significado se solapa y qué factores afectan la opción del hablante por una u otra construcción. También se evalúa la funcionalidad de dos propuestas recientes de clasificación de las CIRH para el análisis de corpus orales. En ambos corpus, la tercera persona del plural es la forma predominante, sobre todo con la lectura corporativa. En cambio, esta lectura no se da en las construcciones con se de los corpus. Además del alcance referencial, la opción por una u otra construcción está vinculada al nivel de contextualidad e intersubjetividad del discurso y a la perspectiva del hablante de cara al evento conceptualizado.

Se toman como agramaticales cláusulas infinitivas con sujeto patente (Bosque y Demonte 1999, Bosque y Gutiérrez Rexach 2009). Pero se han documentado en el caribeño (Morales 1999; Silva-Corvalán 2001). Esta investigación las reexamina desde la microvariación modal, infinitivo/indicativo, y en relación con la variable sujeto. Se ha estudiado la variación infinitivo/subjuntivo (Morales 1986, 1999; De Mello 1995; Serrano 2005; Kempchinsky 1988, 1998; Aponte 2008), pero no se ha examinado el papel del sujeto. Este estudio se basa en una muestra de 96 participantes: 72 caribeños, y 24 mexicanos, a quienes se les administró un cuestionario de juicios de gramaticalidad; también un corpus oral de 25 puertorriqueños y de 100 mexicanos. Los hallazgos se sometieron a GoldVarb 2001. Los caribeños aceptan y usan con mayor frecuencia las cláusulas infinitivas con sujeto patente. La gramática caribeña posee un subparámetro pragmático-sintáctico que hace gramaticales estas estructuras, con un significado procesal (Terkourafi 2011).

Word position, together with the following phonetic context, is generally considered to be one of the most important linguistic factors that condition the weakening of Spanish syllable-final s. In this article a critical look is taken at the ways its influence has been studied up to this date, and, based on the data from our own previous research in Ciudad Real, Spain, a more precise way of assessing its relevance is proposed. It is argued that the procedure of comparing one word-internal context (preconsonantal) with three word-final ones (preconsonantal, prevocalic and prepausal) is fundamentally flawed, and it is suggested that the possible influence of all contextual factors needs to be eliminated for us to be able to appraise the actual importance of the distributional factors. When assessed in this way, word position seems to play a far more marginal role than is usually considered.