Article published In:
Spanish in ContextVol. 1:1 (2004) ► pp.41–65
Perseveration of subject expression across regional dialects of Spanish
Models of communication strictly as a function of intention and control founder when confronted by variationist findings of perseveration at different levels of linguistic structure in use. When Poplack (1981) finds that Spanish [s] leads to more [s] and that “zeros lead to zeros,” it is unclear how speaker intention is involved. But, it is clear that what a speaker says at one point will influence what this same speaker says next. Here we identify perseveration of pronominal and null subjects in three dialects of Spanish: Madrid, San Juan, and New York City. In null subject Spanish, expression of subject pronouns leads to more pronouns, and expression of null subjects leads to more nulls. We argue that a perspicuous account of perseveration may be found within Spreading-Activation Theory (Dell 1986), a psycholinguistic theory of production based on speech errors. Thus, this work integrates quantitative dialect description with psycholinguistic explanation.
Cited by
Cited by 68 other publications
Arroyo, José Luis Blas
2008. The variable expression of future tense in Peninsular Spanish: The present (and future) of inflectional forms in the Spanish spoken in a bilingual region. Language Variation and Change 20:1 ► pp. 85 ff. 
Barnes, Sonia
Bayley, Robert, Kristen A. Greer & Cory L. Holland
Benevento, Nicole M. & Amelia J. Dietrich
2015. I think, therefore digo yo: Variable position of the 1sg subject pronoun in New Mexican Spanish-English code-switching. International Journal of Bilingualism 19:4 ► pp. 407 ff.
Bonnici, Lisa M. & Robert Bayley
2010. Recent Research on Latinos in the USA and Canada, Part 2: Spanish Varieties1
. Language and Linguistics Compass 4:2 ► pp. 121 ff.
Bouchard, Marie-Eve
2018. Subject Pronoun Expression in Santomean Portuguese. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 17
Brown, Esther & Javier Rivas
2019. Bringing Purported Black Sheep into the Fold: Galician Inflected Infinitives and Puerto Rican Spanish Pre-Verbal Infinitival Subject Pronouns. Languages 4:2 ► pp. 40 ff.
CAMERON, RICHARD
2005. Aging and gendering. Language in Society 34:01
Cerrón-Palomino, Álvaro
2019. Null-subject encounter: Variable subject pronoun expression in the Spanish of Quechua-Spanish bilinguals in the Central Peruvian Andes. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:5 ► pp. 1005 ff.
Cerrón-Palomino, Álvaro, Sergio Loza & Rosti Vana
2023. A Historical-Variationist Analysis of Subject Pronoun Expression in 19th and Early 20th Century Arizonan Spanish. Languages 8:1 ► pp. 25 ff.
Comajoan, Llorenç
2006. Continuity and Episodic Structure in Spanish Subject Reference. In Functional Approaches to Spanish Syntax, ► pp. 53 ff.
Cuza, Alejandro
2016. The status of interrogative subject–verb inversion in Spanish-English bilingual children. Lingua 180 ► pp. 124 ff.
de Prada Pérez, Ana
2020. Chapter 6. First person singular subject expression in Caribbean heritage speaker Spanish oral production. In Hispanic Contact Linguistics [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 22], ► pp. 140 ff.
de Prada Pérez, Ana
2020. The Interaction of Functional Predictors and the Mechanical Predictor Perseveration in a Variationist Analysis of Caribbean Spanish Heritage Speaker Subject Pronoun Expression. Languages 5:4 ► pp. 36 ff.
Flores-Ferrán, Nydia
2007. A Bend in the Road: Subject Personal Pronoun Expression in Spanish after 30 Years of Sociolinguistic Research. Language and Linguistics Compass 1:6 ► pp. 624 ff.
Flores-Ferrán, Nydia
2010. ¡Tú no me hables! Pronoun expression in conflict narratives. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2010:203
García Salido, Marcos
2018. Referential and Non-referential Uses of the Third Person Pronominal Subject in Spanish. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 47:2 ► pp. 355 ff.
Geeslin, Kimberly L.
2020. Chapter 6. Variationist perspective(s) on interlocutor individual differences. In Cross-theoretical Explorations of Interlocutors and their Individual Differences [Language Learning & Language Teaching, 53], ► pp. 128 ff.
Geeslin, Kimberly L. & Aarnes Gudmestad
2010. AN EXPLORATION OF THE RANGE AND FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE OF FORMS IN POTENTIALLY VARIABLE STRUCTURES IN SECOND-LANGUAGE SPANISH. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 32:3 ► pp. 433 ff.
Geeslin, Kimberly L. & Aarnes Gudmestad
Gudmestad, Aarnes
2013. Variationist Approaches to Second Language Spanish. In The Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition, ► pp. 80 ff.
Gudmestad, Aarnes & Katie Carmichael
2022. A variationist analysis of first-person-singular subject expression in Louisiana French. Language Variation and Change 34:1 ► pp. 53 ff.
Gudmestad, Aarnes & Amanda Edmonds
2023. Chapter 9. The variable use of first-person-singular subject forms during an academic year abroad. In Study Abroad and the Second Language Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Variation in Spanish [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 37], ► pp. 266 ff.
Gurzynski-Weiss, Laura, Kimberly L. Geeslin, Danielle Daidone, Bret Linford, Avizia Yim Long, Ian Michalski & Megan Solon
2018. Chapter 13. Examining multifaceted sources of input. In Usage-inspired L2 Instruction [Language Learning & Language Teaching, 49], ► pp. 291 ff.
Gurzynski-Weiss, Laura, Kimberly L. Geeslin, Avizia Yim Long & Danielle Daidone
2017. Chapter 10. Linguistic variation in instructor provision of oral input. In Expanding Individual Difference Research in the Interaction Approach [AILA Applied Linguistics Series, 16], ► pp. 226 ff.
Kanwit, Matthew
2017. What We Gain by Combining Variationist and Concept-Oriented Approaches: The Case of Acquiring Spanish Future-Time Expression. Language Learning 67:2 ► pp. 461 ff.
LaCasse, Dora
2019. The persistence of expression: Clusivity, partial co-reference, and socioeconomic differentiation of first person plural subject pronoun expression in Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 12:1 ► pp. 65 ff.
Li, Aini, Meredith Tamminga & Hai Hu
2023. Intra- and interspeaker repetitiveness in Chengdu Mandarin locative variation. Language Variation and Change ► pp. 1 ff.
Li, Xiaoshi
2010. Variability in Chinese: The Case of a Morphosyntactic Particle. Sociolinguistic Studies 4:1 ► pp. 227 ff.
Li, Xiaoshi
2014. VARIATION IN SUBJECT PRONOMINAL EXPRESSION IN L2 CHINESE. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 36:1 ► pp. 39 ff.
Li, Xiaoshi, Wenjing Li & Yaqiong Cui
2021. The use of le 了 in Mandarin Chinese oral discourse. Chinese Language and Discourse. An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 12:2 ► pp. 135 ff.
Linford, Bret & Kimberly Geeslin
2022. The role of referent cohesiveness in variable subject expression in L2 Spanish. Spanish in Context 19:3 ► pp. 508 ff.
Linford, Bret, Avizia Yim Long, Megan Solon, Melissa Whatley & Kimberly L. Geeslin
2016. Lexical frequency and subject expression in native and non-native Spanish. In Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 8], ► pp. 197 ff.
Long, Avizia Y.
2021. Korean Learners’ Acquisition and Use of Variable First-Person Subject Forms in Spanish. Languages 6:4 ► pp. 208 ff.
Long, Avizia Yim & Kimberly L. Geeslin
2020. Chapter 7. Examining the role of instructor first language in classroom-based oral input. In Cross-theoretical Explorations of Interlocutors and their Individual Differences [Language Learning & Language Teaching, 53], ► pp. 160 ff.
Lubbers Quesada, Margaret
2013. Subject Pronouns in Second Language Spanish. In The Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition, ► pp. 253 ff.
McKinnon, Sean
2018. Chapter 15. An initial examination of imperfect subjunctive variation in Catalonian Spanish. In Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 15], ► pp. 333 ff.
Neumann, Farrah & Matthew Kanwit
2020. Acquiring variable commands at home and abroad: Examining optatives and imperatives in L1 and L2 Spanish
. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 13:1 ► pp. 79 ff.
Newall, Gregory
2016. Second person singular forms in Cali Colombian Spanish. In Forms of Address in the Spanish of the Americas [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 10], ► pp. 149 ff.
Orozco, Rafael
2018. El castellano del Caribe colombiano en la ciudad de Nueva York: El uso variable de sujetos pronominales
. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 11:1 ► pp. 89 ff.
Orozco, Rafael & Luz Marcela Hurtado
2020. A Variationist Study of Subject Pronoun Expression in Medellín, Colombia. Languages 6:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Ortiz López, Luis A.
2011. Spanish in Contact with Haitian Creole. In The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, ► pp. 418 ff.
Otheguy, Ricardo & Naomi L. Shin
2022. A Columbia School Perspective on Explanation in Morphosyntactic Variation. In Explanations in Sociosyntactic Variation, ► pp. 90 ff.
PICHLER, HEIKE & STEPHEN LEVEY
2011. In search of grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: general extenders in northeast England. English Language and Linguistics 15:3 ► pp. 441 ff.
Posio, Pekka
2014. Subject expression in grammaticalizing constructions: The case of creo and acho ‘I think’ in Spanish and Portuguese. Journal of Pragmatics 63 ► pp. 5 ff.
Pulido, Manuel F.
2021. Remapping variable subject position in Spanish intransitives. Spanish in Context 18:2 ► pp. 257 ff.
Ramos, Miguel
Reston N, Bell, Candilis Phillip J & Johnson Nicole R
2021. An update on outpatient competence restoration outcomes: The Washington DC Model. Journal of Forensic Science and Research 5:1 ► pp. 001 ff.
Rivas, Javier, Esther L. Brown & Mayra Cortés-Torres
2018. Variable subject pronominal expression in non-finite clauses: Implications for variant patterns and emergent contexts. Lingua 215 ► pp. 27 ff.
Rodríguez-Riccelli, Adrián
2021. Variable subject pronoun expression in Cabo-Verdean Creole. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 36:1 ► pp. 109 ff.
Schnell, Stefan & Danielle Barth
2018. Discourse motivations for pronominal and zero objects across registers in Vera'a. Language Variation and Change 30:1 ► pp. 51 ff.
Schnell, Stefan & Danielle Barth
2020. Expression of anaphoric subjects in Vera'a: Functional and structural factors in the choice between pronoun and zero. Language Variation and Change 32:3 ► pp. 267 ff.
Serratrice, Ludovica & Coralie Hervé
2015. Referential expressions in bilingual acquisition. In The Acquisition of Reference [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 15], ► pp. 311 ff.
Shin, Naomi Lapidus
2014. Grammatical complexification in Spanish in New York: 3sg pronoun expression and verbal ambiguity. Language Variation and Change 26:3 ► pp. 303 ff.
Shin, Naomi Lapidus & Helen Smith Cairns
2012. The Development of NP Selection in School-Age Children: Reference and Spanish Subject Pronouns. Language Acquisition 19:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Tamminga, Meredith
2016. Persistence in phonological and morphological variation. Language Variation and Change 28:3 ► pp. 335 ff.
Tamminga, Meredith, Christopher Ahern & Aaron Ecay
2016. Generalized Additive Mixed Models for intraspeaker variation. Linguistics Vanguard 2:s1
Tamminga, Meredith, Laurel MacKenzie & David Embick
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Catherine E. Travis
2011. Testing convergence via code-switching: priming and the structure of variable subject expression. International Journal of Bilingualism 15:3 ► pp. 241 ff.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Catherine E. Travis
2014. Prosody, priming and particular constructions: The patterning of English first-person singular subject expression in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 63 ► pp. 19 ff.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Catherine E. Travis
2019. Variationist typology: Shared probabilistic constraints across (non-)null subject languages. Linguistics 57:3 ► pp. 653 ff.
Travis, Catherine E.
2007. Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19:02
Travis, Catherine E. & Amy M. Lindstrom
2016. Different registers, different grammars? Subject expression in English conversation and narrative. Language Variation and Change 28:1 ► pp. 103 ff.
Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos
Turell, M. Teresa
2011. The use of textual, grammatical and sociolinguistic evidence in forensic text comparison:. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 17:2
WAGNER, SUSANNE
2018. Never saw one – first-person null subjects in spoken English1. English Language and Linguistics 22:01 ► pp. 1 ff.
Zyzik, Eve
2017. Subject expression in L2 Spanish: Convergence of generative and usage-based perspectives?. Second Language Research 33:1 ► pp. 33 ff.
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 may 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.