Orality and overtness: effects on Spanish subject use

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Corpus Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Previous research linked orality to pronoun expression in Portuguese and French.
• The Corpus Diacrónico del Español Latinoamericano: Edición de Sujetos (CorDELES) was developed to study historical Spanish pronoun usage.
• A contact hypothesis involving enslaved Africans in the Caribbean was considered.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the historical development of subject pronoun expression in Latin American Spanish.
• To determine if orality influences subject pronoun expression.
• To test the hypothesis that contact with enslaved Africans affected pronoun expression.

Main Methods:

• An orality measurement was adapted for Spanish.
• The adapted measurement was applied to the CorDELES corpus.
• A mixed-effects model was used to analyze the data, including orality and year as predictors.

Main Results:

• Orality was found to be a strong predictor of subject pronoun expression.
• Significant effects were observed for the distinction between Spain and the Americas.
• An interaction between year and orality was identified, suggesting changes over time.

Conclusions:

• Orality plays a crucial role in shaping subject pronoun expression in Spanish.
• The study provides evidence for the benefits of incorporating orality into corpus linguistics research.
• Findings contribute to understanding the historical evolution of Spanish language varieties.