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Part of
Current Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics
Edited by Diego Pascual y Cabo and Idoia Elola
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 27] 2020
► pp. 85–108

Chapter 4
The effect of grammatical person on subject pronoun expression in the oral narratives of Spanish second language learners

| Maynooth University
| University of Kansas
In this paper we offer a variationist analysis of Spanish L2 subject pronoun expression (SPE) in sociolinguistic interviews, comparing first (1sg) and third person singular (3sg) subjects. Variationist analyses of Spanish L2 SPE are rather scant, with important differences in the analyses of monolingual and bilingual Spanish. In this paper, we compare SPE in the speech of 15 L2ers and 5 native speakers (NSs), using a comparative variationist methodology. Our results indicate that the acquisition of overt subject rates is easier in 1sg than in 3sg while the acquisition of the variables that regulate the distribution is easier in 3sg than in 1sg. We explain these results based on the notion of markedness.
Keywords: Spanish second language acquisition, subject pronoun expression, null subject parameter, variationist second language acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1L1 subject pronoun expression
    • 1.2Variationist approaches to L2 SPE
  • 2.The present paper
    • 2.1Research questions and hypotheses
    • 2.2Participants
    • 2.3Materials, data and coding
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1All participants and grammatical persons together
    • 3.2Separate analyses by person
      • 3.2.1First person singular
      • 3.2.2Third person singular
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Overall discussion of results
    • 4.2Limitations and future directions
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.27.04dep
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