Overt nonspecific Ellos in Spanish in New York

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Lapidus Shin ◽  
Ricardo Otheguy
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Qualitative Change ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Syntactic Rule ◽  
Subject Pronouns ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Pronoun ◽  
The Subject

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.

Grammatical complexification in Spanish in New York: 3sg pronoun expression and verbal ambiguity

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Lapidus Shin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Latin American ◽  
York City ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Expression Patterns ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Pronoun ◽  
Latin American Immigrants

AbstractThis study provides evidence of grammatical complexification, operationalized as the emergence of a significant linguistic constraint on the use of a linguistic structure, in Spanish spoken in New York City. Analyses of 4276 third-person singular verbs produced in sociolinguistic interviews with first-generation Latin American immigrants and second-generation US-born Latinos demonstrate that third-person singular subject pronoun expression (ella canta ~ canta ‘she sings ~ sings’) is constrained by tense/mood/aspect in the second generation, but not the first. Further analysis shows that this effect reflects a strategy aimed at clear referent identification. I conclude by suggesting that the increase in attention to ambiguous verb morphology, that is, the complexification, is related to other, concomitant changes in pronoun expression patterns in Spanish in New York City.

Concentrated Foreclosure Activity and Distressed Properties in New York City

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (5) ◽  
pp. 868-897
Author(s):  
Kristin L. Perkins ◽  
Michael J. Lear ◽  
Elyzabeth Gaumer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Lower Probability ◽  
Sociodemographic Characteristics ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Policy Interventions ◽  
The Subject

Recent research suggests that foreclosures have negative effects on homeowners and neighborhoods. We examine the association between concentrated foreclosure activity and the risk of a property with a foreclosure filing being scheduled for foreclosure auction in New York City. Controlling for individual property and sociodemographic characteristics of the neighborhood, being located in a tract with a high number of auctions following the subject property’s own foreclosure filing is associated with a significantly higher probability of scheduled foreclosure auction for the subject property. Concentration of foreclosure filings prior to the subject property’s own foreclosure filing is associated with a lower probability of scheduled foreclosure auction. Concentrated foreclosure auctions in the tract prior to a subject property’s own filing is not significantly associated with the probability of scheduled foreclosure auction. The implications for geographic targeting of foreclosure policy interventions are discussed.

scholarly journals The Interaction of Functional Predictors and the Mechanical Predictor Perseveration in a Variationist Analysis of Caribbean Spanish Heritage Speaker Subject Pronoun Expression

Languages ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Ana de Prada Pérez
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Effects ◽  
Reference Tracking ◽  
Heritage Speaker ◽  
Functional Predictors ◽  
Caribbean Spanish ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Pronoun ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Rule Analysis

Subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Spanish has been widely studied across monolingual and bilingual varieties, showing a consistent effect of functional predictors. In recent papers, the role of the mechanical predictor priming, or perseveration, has been the source of debate. Additionally, little is known about the interaction of perseveration and significant functional predictors (e.g., grammatical person). In this paper, we expand on previous research by examining first-person singular (1sg) and third-person singular (3sg) data from sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish–English bilinguals from Florida to explore the possible difference in priming in deictic vs. referential subjects. The results from a mixed-effects variable rule analysis only offered clear evidence of priming in 1sg. We hypothesize that this result could be due to either surprisal (1sg overt pronominal subjects are rarer in the corpus that 3sg overt pronominal subjects) or to 3sg involving reference-tracking and perseveration only being evident in contexts where the subject form does not signal for pragmatic content.

County Government Progress in New York State

1936 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-96
Author(s):  
L. R. Chubb
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
New York State ◽  
County Government ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
York State ◽  
State Constitution ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Government ◽  
Regular Session

The determined attacks which students of county government in New York State have been making on the barriers which have prevented reorganization are at last attaining some success. At its regular session of 1933, the legislature passed and the governor signed a county home rule act sponsored by Senator Fearon, providing simply that any county outside of New York City might “adopt, pursuant to the provisions of this act, a county charter for the government of such county.” This act, however, did nothing effective to remove the considerable obstacles which the state constitution puts in the way of county reform, and was itself of doubtful constitutionality. It served only to throw a clearer light on the fact, already familiar to students of the subject, that in New York it is the constitution that has been the strongest bulwark of antiquated local government.

scholarly journals Students Ability in Producing the Sentences of Simple Present Tense at STMIK Musi Rawas

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-167
Author(s):  
Herlina Herlina ◽  
Maria Ramasari
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Pronoun ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Present Tense

This research aimed to find out the students  ability in producing the sentences of simple present tense at STMIK Musi Rawas. The research was a qualitative study. As stated in findings, it interpreted that there were 34 students (62.91 percent) in the low category. Thus, there were 15 students (27.50 percent) in the good category. Finally, there were 5 students (9.59 percent) in the excellent category. Hence, it can be concluded that students ability in producing the sentences of simple present tense was still low. It showed that many students still got difficulties in producing the sentences of simple present tense especially for verb in third person singular as the subject pronoun. Keywords: students ability, simple present tense, sentences

scholarly journals Subjunctive and subject pronoun realization: a study of "no creo que"

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Harrington ◽  
Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Subject Pronouns ◽  
Subjunctive Mood ◽  
Oral Speech ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Complement Clauses ◽  
Subject Pronoun ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Embedded Clause ◽  
Dependent Clause

Subjunctive mood in complement clauses is licensed under selection from certain predicates or under the scope of a modal or negation. In contexts where mood choice varies, such as the complement of a negated epistemic verb no creer, it introduces a contrast in interpretation. The subjunctive is thought to contribute to a shift in the modal anchoring of the embedded clause, and is consequently interpreted as indicative of a dissociation between the epistemic models of the speaker and the subject. We provide evidence that these uses also interact with pragmatic context. Given independent claims that 1) the overt realization of first person subject pronouns is contrastive and 2) it generally serves to anchor discourse to the speaker’s perspective and 3) overt use is particularly frequent with epistemic verbs, we examined the interaction between negation, first person subject pronoun realization, and mood of the dependent clause for the verb creer.  An analysis of oral speech from the Proyecto de Habla Culta revealed that for negative sentences (no creo que), yo is overtly realized more frequently for cases with exceptional indicative dependents than for those with canonical subjunctive dependents; there was no association with mood for affirmative uses of creer. These results support analyses where negation has specific scope over the contrastive subject, rather than over the epistemic clause. As a consequence, the matrix proposition remains an assertion and use of indicative complements is licensed.

Salsa

Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Bellaviti
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
York City ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Marketing Tool ◽  
Ruben Blades ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Musical Genres

While it has broad popular appeal, an instantly recognizable sound, world-famous performers, and is the subject of sundry books, articles, and movies, the music called “salsa” is, nonetheless, remarkably difficult to define or even to describe. Much that makes salsa meaningful as a musical category—including the origins and meaning of its name, the significance of its Afro-Cuban roots, the importance of Latin and especially Puerto Rican New York to its emergence, and its role as a symbol of ethnic or national identity—turns out to be hotly debated and often contested by its fans and musicians, not to mention the various scholars and journalists whose written work is cited and summarized here. We know that the use of the term “salsa” (literally “sauce”) as a marketing label first became widespread in 1970s when it was applied to a new brand of Cuban son-inspired dance music taken up predominantly by Puerto Ricans living in New York’s hardscrabble East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or “El Barrio.” That the term gained popularity only after fulfilling its function as a marketing tool for music that had clear Cuban roots is a key question that few authors fail to address—namely, whether salsa is merely a rebranded version of Cuban music or is, in reality, a new musical form that owes its provenance to the efforts of Nuyoricans, Puerto Rican New Yorkers. That many salsa performers of note including Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, and Rubén Blades have credited Cuba as the source of the music they played has unquestionably solidified the position of the Cuba camp. At the same time, many scholars have argued that salsa is different from Cuban son. This is particularly true with regard to the subject and message of salsa’s lyrics, the breadth of the musical genres on which it draws, and the social context of Latin Americans in New York City, all factors that, scholars sustain, underpin the features of salsa that are fresh, innovative, and so passionately loved by its creators and fans. The intense Cuban-or-Puerto Rican origins debate notwithstanding, some contemporary salsa scholarship has focused on the ways in which the genre has become a representative music of Latin Americans of diverse national, ethnic, and social backgrounds. These studies have examined salsa practices and performance scenes in places far removed from New York City such as Colombia, Mexico, Spain, and even as far afield as Japan, all of which has expanded our understanding of the various meanings attributed to salsa as it has spread internationally and into increasingly diverse social and cultural settings. This list of resources presents a full picture of the various positions articulated in the debate described here as well as the different theoretical foci taken up by salsa scholars, historians, and writers.

First-Person Plural Subject Pronoun Expression in Mexican Spanish Spoken in Georgia

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-432
Author(s):  
Philip P. Limerick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
First Person ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Pronoun ◽  
Subject Expression ◽  
First Person Plural

Abstract Variationist research on subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Spanish typically incorporates all grammatical persons/numbers into the same analysis, with important exceptions such as studies focusing exclusively on first-person singular (e.g., Travis, Catherine E. 2005. The yo-yo effect: Priming in subject expression in Colombian Spanish. In Randall Gess & Edward J Rubin (eds.), Selected papers from the 34th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), 329–349. Amsterdam, Salt Lake City: Benjamins 2004; Travis, Catherine E. 2007. Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19. 101–135; Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2012. What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4). 711–748), third-person singular (Shin, Naomi Lapidus. 2014. Grammatical complexification in Spanish in New York: 3sg pronoun expression and verbal ambiguity. Language Variation and Change 26. 303–330), and third-person plural subjects (Lapidus, Naomi & Ricardo Otheguy. 2005. Overt nonspecific ellos in Spanish in New York. Spanish in Context 2(2). 157–174). The current study is the first variationist analysis (to the best of my knowledge) to focus solely on first-person plural SPE. It is well-established that nosotros/nosotras exhibits one of the lowest rates of SPE relative to the other persons/numbers; however, factors conditioning its variation are less understood. Conversational corpus data from Mexican Spanish are employed to examine tokens of first-person plural SPE (n=660) in terms of frequency and constraints, incorporating factors such as TMA, switch reference, and verb class in logistic regression analyses. Results suggest that nosotros, like other subjects, is strongly impacted by switch reference and tense-mood-aspect (TMA). However, the TMA effect is unique in that preterit aspect is shown to favor overt nosotros relative to other TMAs, diverging from previous studies. Furthermore, verb class — a factor found to be repeatedly significant in the literature — is inoperative for nosotros. These results suggest that nosotros does not respond to the same factors as other persons/numbers. Additionally, the findings lend support to researchers regarding the importance of studying individual persons/numbers in subject variation research.

Running Away

1983 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 213-216
Author(s):  
John E. Schowalter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Times Square ◽  
Running Away ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Huck Finn ◽  
Glass Menagerie ◽  
The Times

As you begin reading this review, it is quite possible that you are wondering why you are doing so. What do runaways have to do with pediatricians or pediatricians with runaways? It may seem a subject more fitting for a Sunday newspaper supplement and, indeed, it oftentimes has been one. It has also been the subject of such alarming movies as Harddcore with George C. Scott. Statistics are certainly scary. One reads of 1 or 2 million runaways a year and of the estimated 4,000 to 7,000 teenaged prostitutes working in the Times Square area of New York City. This recent publicity is somewhat overwhelming, and is in stark contrast to the benign, romantic image of the runaway with which many of us grew up. This more comfortable runaway is Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, the young rascal who runs away to join the circus, or the young adult telephone man in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie who falls in love with long distance. In addition, some of the professional writings about runaways suggest that the older views are more accurate. They express the importance for some adolescents to get away and work out their own destinies outside of the perhaps repressive or chaotic atmosphere of their families.

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