Usted, tú, and occasionally vos: Variation in 2nd person singular address in New York City Spanish
New York City Spanish using a picture-caption translation task. Seventy NYC heritage/native speakers translated 40 captions—each containing you. Speaker-interlocutor pairings in pictures were stratified by age, status, gender, participant frame, and expressed affect. Participants were stratified by national heritages, childhood and adolescence locations, and gender.
2800 translations yielded 2747 2PS tokens with 275 (10.0%) using usted traditionally described as the formal variant; almost all the remainder had the predominant informal variant tú. Random forests, nested logistic regressions, and post-hoc tests show: • maintenance of factors traditionally claimed for pan-Hispanic tú/usted alternation, • confirmation of expected usted frequency by family origin, • convergence to tú associated with New York adolescence.
Findings suggest the linguistic environment of adolescence to be more important than earlier family or peer language socialization for this pragmatic variable.
Patterns of gender agreement in Spanish are generally assumed to be consistent across dialects. I provide paired qualitative and quantitative analyses of variable gender agreement in the variety of Spanish spoken by both Spanish-Guarani bilinguals and monolinguals in the province of Corrientes, Argentina.
Data are drawn from 14 hours of recorded sociolinguistic interviews carried out in Corrientes in 2017 and 2018. A mixed-effects logistic regression model reveals that this variation is conditioned by distance effects (the presence of intervening material between noun and modifier) and modifier class (determiner vs. adjective).
I attribute synchronic gender agreement variation in Correntinean Spanish to diachronic source language agentivity effects (Van Coetsem 1988) given the lack of gender inflection in Guarani. This phenomenon would be unsurprising as a contact effect if found synchronically only in bilinguals; however, its occurrence in monolinguals sets it aside as a rare instance of variable gender agreement in monolingual Spanish.
Expressing future tense in Spanish: A comparative corpus analysis of Caracas, Malaga, and Mexico City
The present investigation examines corpora from Caracas, Malaga and Mexico City with the goal of comparing the linguistic factors that constrain the variation between two competing future expressions (i.e., morphological vs. periphrastic future). The results indicate that, in the Caracas and Mexico City data, the PF has become more generalized than in Malaga as the default future expression. A variable rule analysis reveals that, while they share similar constraints, the magnitude and direction of effect differ. The change patterns seem more advanced in Mexico, and to some extent in Caracas, with diction and volition verbs and non-specific temporal contexts favoring PF. Malaga, however, favors the PF in contexts associated with its earlier stages of grammaticalization such as with verbs of movement, which indicates its association with meaning of movement or trajectory to a goal, and highly subjective contexts as it is favored in first person and exclamatory and interrogative contexts.
From placeholder to hesitation marker: na in Quechua/Spanish bilingual speech
The current study analyzes the lexical item na in Cusco-Callao Quechua (Southern Peru), as in Na-pi Ururu-pi ka-sa-ncheh-ña? ‘Eh…are we in Ururu yet?’. Using sociolinguistic interview data from bilingual (Quechua/Spanish) speakers from the Cusco region, we observe two primary uses of na. First, it functions as what Fox (2010) refers to as a “placeholder filler” (henceforth ‘placeholder’ similar to English ‘whatchamacallit’) to stand in for another word in the discourse. Second, Nobel and Lacasa (2007) observe that na can be “used alone as a hesitation filler while the speaker is contemplating the next word, but it must have affixed to it the particle that would be affixed to the missing word” (226). In the Quechua data, our analysis reveals patterns, not yet described in the literature, in which na is used with reference to taboo or sensitive topics. Moreover, our Spanish data demonstrate considerable borrowing of na, where it varies with other hesitation markers.
Extension of estar in monolingual and bilingual Spanish: A word embeddings study
This paper uses statistical word embeddings, namely Word2vec (Mikolov et al., 2013; Goldberg and Levy, 2014), to study the extension of estar in three Spanish-speaking communities. Two of these are sub-corpora of PRESEEA (2014-), comprised of 97 interviews from Spain (760,929 words) and 69 interviews from Mexico (597,916 words). The third corpus is of bilingual Spanish in Southern Arizona, CESA (Carvalho, 2012-), and is comprised of 76 interviews (498,711 words). Based on word embeddings extracted from these corpora, distances between target lexical items (e.g., adjectives) and all forms of ser and estar were calculated, which were then used to measure estar preference (i.e., distance to ser minus distance to estar) for each word. Results confirm some of the previous findings (Bessett, 2015; Cortés-Torres, 2004; Geeslin and Guijarro-Fuentes, 2008; Salazar, 2007; Silva-Corvalán, 1986), showing significant difference in the extension of estar across the three corpora.
Dialectal variation in Yucatec Maya has been mentioned since the sixteenth century in documents such as the Motul Dictionary (Martínez Hernández 1929). The first long-scale survey of variation of Yucatec Maya was carried out between 2004 and 2007 (Blaha Pfeiler & Hofling 2006).
This poster presents the results of a dialectological study on a sample of 130 Mayan speakers collected by means of a questionnaire containing issues of lexical and morphonological variation. The examined phenomena reveal different patterns of variation: VARIATION IN SPACE: e.g., in the Eastern variety, the incompletive (k) is being replaced by the progressive aspect (táan). VARIATION DUE TO LANGUAGE CONTACT: e.g., interviewees with higher exposure to Spanish simplify the numeral classifier system using only two classifiers from the 120 available in the language.
This poster presents the dispersion of linguistic features by means of feature maps and focused on the interplay between different sources of variation.
“I’ve always spoke(n) like this, you see”: Participle leveling in three corpora of English
Some English verbs use distinct forms for the preterite (1) and the past participle (2). These verbs may variably show paradigm leveling, where the preterite form is used in place of the participle (3).
(1) I broke the door. (2) I’ve broken the door. (3) I’ve broke the door.
We contribute the first detailed variationist study of participle leveling by investigating the phenomenon in three corpora: Switchboard, a corpus of 10-minute telephone conversations between American English speakers (Godfrey & Holliman 1997); the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus, a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with Philadelphians (Labov & Rosenfelder 2011); and the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English, a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with residents of the North East of England (Corrigan et al. 2012). We find a striking degree of similarity between the three corpora in the constraints on variation. The general picture is of socially-evaluated variation affected by both syntactic and paradigmatic factors.
Colloquialization, early mass literacy and an Emigrant Letter Corpus: the rise of 1st person will in 1830s Canada
This paper examines the social roles of first person modal auxiliary use in early North American/Canadian English. The independent variables of function/meaning, clause type, type of lexical verb, together with socially-inspired categories, such as “level of intimacy” between sender and receiver, are tested in logistic regressions. The data show that 1st person shall was, with 60.7%, much more frequent than in the CORIECOR data from Irish emigrants from the same decade (44.5%). Subordinate clauses act as a “last foothold” for 1stp shall. It is argued that the significantly higher use of 1stp shall represents a conservative writing style, confirming earlier work (Dollinger 2008: 236). It is suggested that the linguistic conservatism in the PEEC data is owed to the longer transatlantic passages, while colloquialization and mass schooling (often confounded as “drift’), rather than dialect contact, seem responsible for the spread of 1stp will.
