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Part of
Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change: Historical sociolinguistic perspectives
Edited by Israel Sanz-Sánchez
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 14] 2024
► pp. 150–178

Chapter 7
Tracing the emergence of the voseo/tuteo semantic split in Río de la Plata second person subjunctives

The role of child language acquisition

ORCID logo | Texas A&M University
ORCID logo | The University of Texas at San Antonio

This study documents the history of second person singular informal variation in Rioplatense Spanish. It focuses on the competition between voseo and tuteo forms in the subjunctive and proposes that the outcome of this variation can be linked to the acquisition of these forms by children. In contrast with other verb forms in the variety, which eradicated tuteo progressively, in the subjunctive tuteo prevailed in epistemic contexts, while voseo continued to be possible in deontic contexts. By combining data from the historical record (Study 1) with converging data from contemporary children acquiring the same structures (Study 2), we show that the subjunctive forms most likely to select tuteo are acquired later, making them more susceptible to normative influence. Because changes in the second singular present subjunctive coincided with the spread of public education in the region, we argue that the semantic split resulted from the interaction of linguistic, social, and developmental factors, and sketch a sociohistorical account for the actuation of this change.

Keywords: voseo, tuteo, Rioplatense Spanish, subjunctive, diachronic change, language acquisition, language variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief sociodemographic history of the Río de la Plata
  • 3.Address forms in RPS
    • 3.1The diachrony of informal address in RPS
    • 3.2The Spanish subjunctive
    • 3.3The voseo/tuteo subjunctive split in RPS
  • 4.Study 1: History of the voseo/tuteo subjunctive split
    • 4.1Data sources
    • 4.2Data coding
    • 4.3Results and discussion
  • 5.Study 2: The acquisition of subjunctive split
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Stimuli and procedure
    • 5.3Results and discussion
  • 6.Language acquisition and the historical sociolinguistics of voseo/tuteo variation in the 2sg subjunctive
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 4 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.14.07moy
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