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Study Abroad and the Second Language Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Variation in Spanish
Edited by Sara L. Zahler, Avizia Y. Long and Bret Linford
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 37] 2023
► pp. 266–290

Chapter 9
The variable use of first-person-singular subject forms during an academic year abroad

| Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
| Université Côte d’Azur

The goal of the current study was to investigate the variable use and development of first-person-singular subject forms in additional-language Spanish before and at the end of an academic year in Spain. Our data came from the LANGSNAP corpus (http://​langsnap​.soton​.ac​.uk). We examined oral semi-guided interviews from 16 participants. We coded all contexts of first-person-singular subject forms, either the personal pronoun yo or an unexpressed subject (K = 3,571), for 11 independent variables. Our mixed-effects model showed that a range of linguistic factors (polarity, clause type, referent continuity, and perseveration) and individual characteristics (engagement with English and placement type) impacted the variable use of first-person-singular subjects and that the use of these subject forms changed over the course of an academic year in Spain.

Keywords: subject expression, variationist approaches, Spanish, study abroad, LANGSNAP
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
    • Sociolinguistic variation
    • Subject expression in Spanish
  • The current study
  • Method
    • Corpus
    • Data coding and analysis
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.37.09gud
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