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Article published In:
Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 35:2 (2022) ► pp.650–674

New considerations for variable clitic placement in Spanish

Findings from Atlanta, Georgia

ORCID logo | Centre College

The current study examines variable clitic placement (CP) in Spanish in a Mexican community in the metropolitan Atlanta area. By employing sociolinguistic interview data from 20 first-generation Mexican speakers, clitic frequencies and constraints are analyzed. Tokens of proclisis and enclisis were coded for linguistic and social factors that potentially influence clitic usage (e.g., topic persistence, specific clitic used, English proficiency, age, gender), and a logistic regression analysis was carried out using Rbrul (Daniel Johnson, 2009). Results indicate a proclisis rate of 64%, which is comparable to other varieties of Mexican Spanish. The regression analysis revealed that CP is sensitive to the particular construction used, the specific clitic, the presence of a pause, and the speaker’s gender. Additionally, English proficiency showed no effect on CP. This analysis supports previous research that CP is impermeable to contact-induced change and also reveals new conditioning factors (specific clitic, presence of a pause) that have not been examined in previous literature.

Keywords: clitic placement, Mexican Spanish, bilingualism, Spanish in the U.S., morphosyntactic variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research on variable CP in Spanish
    • 2.1Finite verb and construction
    • 2.2Topic persistence
    • 2.3Two new factors to consider: Specific clitic and presence of a pause
    • 2.4Social factors
    • 2.5CP in U.S. Spanish
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2The speakers
    • 3.3The variable context
    • 3.4Linguistic variables
    • 3.5Social variables
    • 3.6Statistical methods
  • 4.Results and analysis
    • 4.1Conditioning factors for variable CP
      • 4.1.1Particular construction
      • 4.1.2Specific clitic
      • 4.1.3Presence of a pause
      • 4.1.4Gender
      • 4.1.5Interactions between gender and other factors
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.20026.lim
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