scholarly journals Clitic Doubling in Majorcan Spanish and Catalan

10.29007/zdfp ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelia Jiménez ◽  
Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes ◽  
Acrisio Pires
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Clitic Doubling ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
Indirect Object ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Personal A ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Peninsular Spanish

In this study, we focus on clitic doubling with a human or animate referent. We attempt to determine whether or not bilingual Catalan-Spanish speakers (from Mallorca, Spain) employ the corresponding preposition (so-called personal a) in this type of clitic doubling structure in Spanish and in Catalan. In addition, we consider the use of third-person [± human] pronominal, non-reflexive clitics, both for direct and indirect object.We present results from a study of forty bilingual speakers from Mallorca. The data we analyzed came from spontaneous oral production data from all the participants in the study. Each participant was recorded twice, once in Spanish and once in the Majorcan Catalan variety. Each recording consisted of interviews with the researcher involving a variety of topics and lasted approximately 10 to 15 minutes.The preliminary results indicate that in Majorcan Spanish there are no substantial differences compared to Peninsular Spanish regarding the use of third person, non-reflexive clitics. Regarding the Majorcan Catalan uses, the results are also not so different in comparison to Peninsular Catalan, but we see a substantial increase in the rate of distinct uses of the neutral clitic ho. However, when third-person clitics are used in a clitic doubling structure in Spanish there is a difference between L1 speakers of Catalan and L1 speakers of Spanish. This is because the former tend to omit the preposition in the corresponding DP.

scholarly journals A multimodal cognitive approach to aid the conceptualization of Spanish utterances with ‘se’

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-710
Author(s):  
Renia Lopez-Ozieblo
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cognitive Grammar ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Proficiency Levels ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Peninsular Spanish ◽  
Advanced Proficiency

AbstractMost native speakers of Spanish are intuitively able to construct correct structures with the marker ‘se’. On the other hand, non-native speakers, even those at advanced proficiency levels, have difficulties producing most constructions with ‘se’. This is hardly surprising as the marker ‘se’, one of the most common words in Spanish, can convey highly pragmatic nuances with a variety of functions that are still much debated among linguists. This study analyses some of the most used functions of the marker in the oral production of 18 Peninsular Spanish speakers from a multimodal Cognitive Grammar approach, identifying how gestures might be employed by speakers to create or clarify meaning. Our results confirm that gestures are used differently depending on the function of the marker. Middle voices where ‘se’ marks high levels of subject involvement and/or energy co-occur with related gestures, while middle voices or impersonal structures, where the involvement and/or energy is low, co-occur more often with unrelated gestures, if any.

scholarly journals Semantic Categories and Gender Assignment in Contact Spanish: Type of Code-Switching and its Relevance to Linguistic Outcomes

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Osmer Balam
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Semantic Domains

The present study examines two aspects of determiner phrases (dps) that have been previously investigated in Spanish/English code-switching; namely, the openness of semantic domains to non-native nouns and gender assignment in monolingual versus code-switched speech. The quantitative analysis of naturalistic, oral production data from 62 native speakers of Northern Belizean Spanish revealed both similarities and notable differences vis-à-vis previous findings for varieties of Spanish/English code-switching in theu.s. Hispanophone context. Semantic domains that favoured non-native nouns in Spanish/Englishdps included academia, technology, work/money-related terms, abstract concepts, linguistics/language terms and everyday items. In relation to gender assignation, assignment patterns in monolingualdps were canonical whereas an overwhelming preference for the masculine default gender was attested in mixeddps. Biological gender was not found to be deterministic in switcheddps. The analysis highlights the important role that type of code-switching has on contact outcomes in bi/multilingual communities, as speech patterns are reflective of the status and resourcefulness that code-switching is afforded at a societal and idiolectal level.

scholarly journals Spanish-English Bilingual Children’s Relative Use of English Tense and Agreement Morphemes

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Potapova ◽  
Sonja L. Pruitt-Lord
Keyword(s):  
Best Practice ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
Language Assessment ◽  
Language Ability ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Third Person

Best practice for bilingual speakers involves considering performance in each language the client uses. To support this practice for young clients, a comprehensive understanding of how bilingual children develop skills in each language is needed. To that end, the present work investigates relative use of English tense and agreement (T/A) morphemes—a skill frequently considered as part of a complete language assessment—in Spanish-English developing bilingual preschoolers with varying levels of language ability. Results indicate that developing bilingual children with both typical and weak language skills demonstrate greater use of copula and auxiliary BE relative to third person singular, past tense and auxiliary DO. Findings thus reveal a relative ranking of T/A morphemes in developing bilingual children that differs from that of English monolingual children, who demonstrate relatively later emergence and productivity of auxiliary BE. In turn, findings demonstrate the importance of utilizing appropriate comparisons in clinical practice.

scholarly journals Feature Matching Does Not Equal Convergence: Acquisition of L2 French Accusative Pronouns by L1 Spanish Speakers

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Elena Shimanskaya ◽  
Tania Leal
Keyword(s):  
Feature Matching ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Formal Similarity ◽  
Considerable Difficulty ◽  
Feature Reassembly ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Surface Similarity

Our study aims to determine whether formal similarity between two languages (operationalized via the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis) allows adult L2 learners of French (Spanish native speakers; NSs) to straightforwardly acquire third-person singular accusative clitics in their L2. Additionally, we examined the role of surface similarity, since French and Spanish overlap and diverge in several ways. In terms of formal similarity, third-person accusative clitic pronouns in Spanish are almost perfect analogues of their French counterparts. In terms of surface similarity, however, while the feminine accusative pronouns are identical (“la” [la]), the masculine ones differ in Spanish (“lo” [lo]) and French (“le” [lǝ]). Participants included French NSs (n = 26) and Spanish-speaking L2 French learners (n = 36). Results from an offline forced-choice picture selection task and an online self-paced reading task did not support the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis because learners showed considerable difficulty with the interpretation and processing of these pronouns, revealing that, unlike French NSs, their interpretations and processing are guided by the feature [±Human] and, to a lesser degree, by gender, which might be due to the surface-level similarity between feminine accusative clitic pronouns in both languages.

Linguistic levelling in Spanish: The analogical strong preterites

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-225
Author(s):  
Enrique Pato
Keyword(s):  
Geographic Distribution ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Peninsular Spanish

AbstractCertain Peninsular Spanish varieties have two third-person plural forms in the simple past indicative of verbs with ‘strong’ (stem-stressed) preterites. While this phenomenon is documented in large-scale linguistic atlas surveys, its current geographic distribution and diachronic origins remain under-studied. This paper sets out to: 1) establish the geographic distribution of these variants; the differing methodologies and epochs of the data sources make them particularly interesting to compare, showing that these analogical strong preterites have suffered a drastic decline over the last century; 2) use historical corpus data to show that the vernacular variant is by no means a recent phenomenon; 3) examine external history as a source of explanation in linguistic reconstruction, showing that this process of analogical levelling took place after the reconquest and resettlement of these regions. These findings support the hypothesis of a feature which spread over the centuries by linguistic diffusion.

scholarly journals A comparative study of media, media use and ethnolinguistic vitality in bilingual communities

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 283-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Moring ◽  
Catharina Lojander-Visapää ◽  
Andrea Nordqvist ◽  
Laszlo Vincze ◽  
Nadja Mänty
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Institutional Analysis ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Minority Languages ◽  
Ethnolinguistic Vitality ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
South Tyrol ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Bilingual Communities

This paper presents some preliminary results from acomparative study of interrelations between identity (in terms of subjectively identified identity); media (in terms of completeness in supply); media use (in terms of choice of language); and EV among bilingual speakers of autochthonous minority languages. It builds on studies that are carried out among German speakers in South Tyrol, Hungarian speakers in Romania and Swedish speakers in Finland, combining institutional analysis and quantitative surveys in a comparative perspective

La duplicación de clíticos en español como estrategia de marcación inversa

Revue Romane ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-206
Author(s):  
Natalia Pericchi ◽  
Bert Cornillie ◽  
Freek Van de Velde ◽  
Kristin Davidse
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Clitic Doubling ◽  
Indirect Object ◽  
Syntactic Function ◽  
19Th And 20Th Century

Abstract Clitic doubling is the phenomenon in which, in a clause, a NP or a stressed pronoun and a clitic pronoun refer to the same entity and have the same syntactic function. Previous studies on this phenomenon in Spanish observe that it takes place when the elements involved have features such as +preposition and +definiteness that make them prone to topicalization, such as with stressed pronouns (Silva-Corvalán, 1984; Melis and Flores, 2009; Vázquez Rozas and García Salido, 2012). However, we have found that in 19th and 20th Century Spanish, doubling often occurs with elements that are not typically topical, such as indefinite NPs. On the basis of a sample of the Argentinian variety from the CORDE and CREA corpora we found that doubling in ditransitive clauses has two functions: it can mark topical indirect objects, but it can also flag inverse distributions which have unexpected promotion of the direct object and demotion of the indirect object in the accessibility scale.

scholarly journals Erosão linguística na aquisição bilingue português – umbundu: evidências no domínio da formação do plural

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-85
Author(s):  
Bernardino Valente Calossa ◽  
Cristina Flores
Keyword(s):  
Bilingual Students ◽  
Older Students ◽  
School Students ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
9Th Grade ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
The Family ◽  
Family Language ◽  
Language Exposure ◽  
3Rd Grade

The present study assesses the linguistic development of Portuguese-Umbundu bilingual speakers in Angola by focusing on the production of plural forms. In particular, we analyse if changes in the degree of language exposure, after entering into the school, favor the occurrence of attrition in Umbundu, the home language, in parallel to the development of Portuguese, the dominant school language. A group of 28 bilingual students (14 3rd grade primary school students and 14 teenagers attending the 9th grade) and 28 age-matched monolingual speakers of Portuguese participated in a picture-based oral production elicitation task. The results show that the 3rd grade students have more difficulties in producing the plural in Portuguese, especially in situations where they have to apply particular rules (e.g. replace -ão with -ões), compared to Umbundu, the language that forms the plural by changing nominal classes. However, older students (9th graders) show more difficulties in forming the plural in Umbundu. Although this is not a longitudinal study, the data suggest that the change in the degree of language exposure, as a consequence of schooling in Portuguese, may have contributed to this inversion, which leads us to infer that the family language is vulnerable to attrition effects.

scholarly journals Prosodic accommodation and salience: The nuclear contours of Andalusian Spanish speakers in Asturias

Loquens ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 043
Author(s):  
Aurora Troncoso-Ruiz ◽  
Gorka Elordieta
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Prosodic Features ◽  
Northern Spain ◽  
Control Groups ◽  
Dialect Contact ◽  
Hybrid Variety ◽  
Pitch Contours ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Peninsular Spanish ◽  
Experimental Group

This study investigates the convergent accommodating behaviour of Andalusian speakers (Southern Spain) relocated in Asturias (Northern Spain), a context of dialect contact, in terms of intonation. We aim to address three research questions: (1) is there evidence for accommodation? (2) Do social factors determine accommodation? And (3) does salience predict which prosodic features are more likely to be adopted by relocated speakers? We elaborated a corpus of spontaneous speech including an experimental group of Andalusian speakers in Asturias and two control groups of Asturian and Andalusian people. The relocated Andalusians were interviewed by a speaker of Andalusian Spanish and a speaker of Amestáu (hybrid variety between Asturian and Spanish), and their intonation patterns were compared to the ones found in the control populations. During the interviews, we also gathered data about how integrated these relocated speakers were in Asturias. We found that all participants show a tendency towards convergent accommodation to the Amestáu interlocutor, producing late falling pitch contours in nuclear position in declaratives and final falling contours in absolute interrogatives. The most integrated speakers in the Asturian community are the ones showing more features of the varieties spoken in the area. Finally, the most salient features to an Andalusian ear—the presence of final falls in Asturian, Asturian Spanish and Amestáu absolute interrogatives as opposed to final rises in Andalusian and Standard Peninsular Spanish—were the ones showing the highest percentages of adoption in relocated speakers. We could conclude, then, that the most salient prosodic features are acquired more easily by the most integrated relocated speakers.

Object clitics, agreement and dialectal variation

Probus ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Ormazabal ◽  
Juan Romero
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Object Relation ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Dialectal Variation ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
Indirect Object ◽  
Object Clitics ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Mixed Approach

Abstract This article presents an analysis of object clitics in Spanish and some of its consequences for the theory of agreement and Case. On the empirical side, we present syntactic, morphological and semantic arguments supporting a mixed approach to object clitics where 3rd person Direct Object (DO) cliticization constitutes a genuine case of Determiner movement, but other DO and Indirect Object (IO) clitics are agreement elements. Once third person object clitics are set aside, the emerging picture is a single agreement that does not discriminate between DOs and IOs in the syntax. This idea finds striking support in Basque Leísta Dialect, where there is a 3rd person DO agreement clitic that behaves in all relevant respects like all other agreement clitics. Moreover, the consequences of this analysis extend to other properties of the object relation in Spanish, such as Differential Object Marking (DOM), and dialectal variation in the clitic field. An interesting observation that arises from this study is that the agreement nature of 1st and 2nd person clitics and the whole series of IOs is extremely robust in Spanish and remains invariable across all the dialects analyzed. Variation is thus restricted to 3rd person DO objects, where in contrast the changes are diverse and take very different directions, a fact that raises interesting questions related both to the historical evolution of the clitic system and to the theoretical analysis of Case and agreement.

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