Article published In:
Spanish in ContextVol. 12:3 (2015) ► pp.349–372
Resumption or contrast?
Non-standard subject pronouns in Spanish Relative Clauses
This article is a contribution to the study of subject resumptive pronouns (RPs) in Spanish relative clauses (RCs). Previous studies have focused only on the constraints governing RPs across the different functions relativized: subject, direct object and oblique. In this variationist study, two analyses were conducted for the Peruvian Limeño variety: on the one hand, RPs were analyzed as a whole, following the aforementioned tradition; on the other hand, subject RPs were studied separately. When comparing the results of both analyses, it was found that the constraints favoring subject RPs are only a subset of the ones governing RPs as a whole, and the ranking of these constraints is also different. In addition, upon closer inspection, a different type of non-standard subject pronoun was identified: a contrastive one.
Keywords: resumption, sociolinguistics, subject
References (23)
Bentivoglio, Paola. 2003. “Las construcciones ‘de retoma en las cláusulas relativas: un análisis variacionista. In Lengua, Variación y Contexto. Estudios dedicados a Humberto López Morales (2), ed. by Francisco Moreno, José Antonio Samper Padilla, María Vaquero, María Luz Gutiérrez Araus, César Hernández Alonso, and Francisco Gimeno Menéndez, 507–520. Madrid: Arco Libros.
Borzi, Claudia, and Mabel Morano. 2009. “Cláusulas relativas con duplicación del objeto. Onomázein 19 (1): 71–88.
Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink. 2014. “Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Computer program]. Version 5.3.83, retrieved 19 November 2012 from [URL]
Cerrón-Palomino, Álvaro. 2006. “Pronombres de retoma en cláusulas relativas del castellano peruano: un fenómeno de causación múltiple. Lexis 29 (2): 231–258.
Chafe, Wallace. 1976. “Givenness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness, Subjects and Topics. In Subject and Topic, ed. by Charles N. Li, 27–55. New York: Academic Press.
Caravedo, Rocío. 1989. El español de Lima. Materiales para el estudio del habla culta. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial.
Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Franco, Jon. 1993. “On Object Agreement in Spanish. PhD diss., University of Southern California.
Hawkins, John. 2004. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Herrera, Juana. 1990. “Duplicaciones pronominales en las oraciones de relativo. In Actas del Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística. XX Aniversario (1), ed. by María Ángeles Álvarez Martínez, 548–554. Madrid: Gredos.
Joseph, Brian. 1983. “Relativization in Modern Greek. Another Look at the Accessibility Hierarchy Constraints. Lingua 601: 1–24.
Keenan, Edward, and Bernard Comrie. 1977. “Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8 (1): 63–99.
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ladefoged, Peter. 1982. A Course in Phonetics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers.
Molnár, Valéria. 2001. “Contrast from a Contrastive Perspective. Information Structure, Discourse Structure and Discourse Semantics. In ESSLLI2001 Workshop Proceedings, ed. by I. Krujff-Korbayová and M. Steedman, 99–114. Helsinki: The University of Helsinki Press.
Prince, Ellen. 1990. “Syntax and Discourse: A Look at Resumptive Pronouns. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Berkeley Linguistics Society Annual Meeting, ed. by Kira Hall, Jean Pierre Koenig, Michael Meacham, Sondra Reinman, and Laurel Sutton, 482–497. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, Inc.
Samper, José, Clara Hernández, and Otilia Pérez. 2005. “Las construcciones de retoma en las cláusulas relativas en el español de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In Filología y Lingüística. Estudios ofrecidos a Antonio Quilis, ed. by César Hernández Alonso, 611–628. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia y Universidad de Valladolid.
Sankoff, David, Sali Tagliamonte, and Eric Smith. 2005. “Goldvarb X. Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. [URL].
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 1996. “Resumptive Pronouns: A Discourse Explanation. In Aspects of Romance Linguistics, ed. by Claudia Parodi, Carlos Quicoli, Mario Saltarelli, and María Luisa Zubizarreta, 383–395. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Suárez Fernández, Mercedes. 2010. “Cláusulas de relativo con pronombre personal anafórico en castellano medieval. Nueva revista de filología hispánica 58 (1): 1–37.
Tarallo, Fernando. 1986. “Functional and Structural Properties in a Variable Syntax. In Diversity and Diachrony, ed. by David Sankoff, 239–248. Ottawa: John Benjamins.
Traxler, Matthew, Rihanna Williams, Shelley Blozis, and Robin Morris. 2005. “Working Memory, Animacy, and Verb Class in the Processing of Relative Clauses. Journal of Memory and Language 531: 204–224.
Trujillo, Ramón. 1990. “Sobre la supuesta despronominalización del relativo. Estudios de Lingüística 61: 23–46. Universidad de Alicante.
Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Agulló, Jorge
2024. El pronombre reasuntivo en español como mecanismo de concordancia. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 97 ► pp. 121 ff. 
Pato, Enrique & Jorge Agulló
2023. "Una paella como la hacen en Valencia": ¿existe el reasuntivo ‘modal’ en español?. Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxía
Cerrón-Palomino, Álvaro & Rosti Vana
2022. Tracking subject position change in U.S. Southwest Spanish: what 19th and 20th century Tucson newspapers tell us. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 8:2 ► pp. 269 ff.
Lopes Câmara, Aliana & Roberto Gomes Camacho
2019. La expresión del pronombre reasuntivo en la cláusula relativa en la lengua española. Hispanic Research Journal 20:3 ► pp. 197 ff.
Cerrón-Palomino, Álvaro
2018. Pronominal resumption in Spanish direct object relative clauses. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 11:2 ► pp. 265 ff.
Lopes Câmara, Aliana
2018. El procesamiento de la oración relativa en español: interferencias del factor «distancia» en el uso del pronombre reasuntivo. Forma y Función 31:2 ► pp. 69 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 july 2024. 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.