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