Cover not available
Article published In:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 18:2 (2021) ► pp.257–284

Remapping variable subject position in Spanish intransitives

A proposal for functionally defined categories in motion verbs

| Penn State University

In Spanish, a SVO language with variable word order, post-verbal subjects have been proposed to be favored for particular verb categories. For instance, based on agentivity, unaccusatives are proposed to favor VS as a whole. Motion verbs are regarded as unaccusatives generally favoring VS order. An alternative analysis is presented here, using data from two conversational corpora. Motion verbs are recategorized based on their predicted tendency to include adverbials in the sentence and compared with other unaccusatives. Motion verbs are divided according to their Deictic Function (Talmy 2000) into “come” verbs (i.e., “motion-toward-the-center,” that is, the speaker), and “go” verbs. “Come” verbs do not often require target specification through an adverbial, whereas “go” verbs do. Adverbials were found to appear as post-verbal path specification in “go” verbs; due to weight factors, such specifiers favor pre-verbal subjects. Importantly, even when no modifier is present, trends persist, suggesting entrenchment of usage patterns.

Keywords: subject position, unaccusatives, weight factors
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1A function-driven approach to the study of variability in Spanish subject position
    • 1.2A functional approach for a classification of motion verbs
    • 1.3Hypotheses
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Corpus data
    • 2.2Circumscribing the envelope of variation
    • 2.3Linguistic variables
      • 2.3.1Measuring contextual accessibility of the subject: Referential distance
      • 2.3.2Definiteness of the subject
      • 2.3.3Other constituents within the sentence: Adverbial expressions
      • 2.3.4Verb type
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Communicative functions and verb modifiers
    • 3.2Specification, weight factors and their effect on subject position
    • 3.3Evidence of conventionalization of frequent usage patterns
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.19006.pul
References
Aranovich, Raúl
2003 “The Semantics of Auxiliary Selection in Old Spanish.” Studies in Language: International Journal Sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” 27 (1): 1. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alamillo, Asela Reig
2009 “Cross-Dialectal Variation in Propositional Anaphora: Null Objects and Propositional Lo in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish.” Language Variation and Change 21 (03): 381. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ashby, William J., and Paola Bentivoglio
1993 “Preferred argument structure in spoken French and Spanish.” Language variation and change 5 (1): 61–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker and Steve Walker
2015 “Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4.” Journal of Statistical Software 67 (1): 1–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J., and Bates, D. M.
2008 “Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items.” Journal of memory and language 59 (4): 390–412. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benevento, Nicole M., and 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): 407–422. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bentivoglio, Paola
1993 “Full NPs in spoken Spanish: A discourse profile.” In Linguistic Perspectives on Romance Languages: Selected Papers from the XXI Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, February 21 24, vol. 103, 211. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bentivoglio, Paola, and Elizabeth G. Weber
1986 “A Functional Approach to Subject Word Order in Spoken Spanish.” In Studies in Romance Linguistics: Selected papers of the fourteenth Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages, ed. By O. Jaeggli and C. Silva-Corvalán, 23–40. Riverton, USA: Foris. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Esther L., and Javier Rivas
2012 “Grammatical relation Probability: How Usage Patterns Shape Analogy.” Language Variation and Change 24 (3): 317–341. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Richard
1992 Pronominal and null subject variation in Spanish: Constraints, dialects, and functional compensation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Cameron, Richard, and Nydia Flores-Ferrán
2004 “Perseveration of subject expression across regional dialects of Spanish.” Spanish in Context 1 (1): 41–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carvalho, Ana M., Rafael Orozco, and Naomi Lapidus Shin
2015 (eds.). Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A cross-dialectal perspective, xiii–xxvi. Washington DC: Georgetown.Google Scholar
Cestero, Ana M., Isabel Molina and Florentino Paredes
2012 La Lengua Hablada en Madrid. Corpus PRESEEA-MADRID (Distrito de Salamanca). I. Hablantes de Instrucción Superior. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace
1994 Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Contreras, Heles
1978 El orden de Palabras en Español. Madrid: Cátedra.Google Scholar
De Miguel, E.
1999 “El Aspecto Léxico.” In Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española, ed. By Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte, 2987–3060. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John
1985 “Competing Motivations.” In Iconicity in Syntax, ed. By John Haiman, 343–365. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John W.
2003 “Discourse and Grammar.” In The new psychology of language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, ed. By Michael Tomasello, vol. 21, 47–88. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Erker, Daniel, and Gregory R. Guy
2012 “The role of lexical frequency in syntactic variability: Variable subject personal pronoun expression in Spanish.” Language 88 (3): 526–557. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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): 624–652. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy
1983 “Topic Continuity in Discourse: An Introduction.” In Topic Continuity In Discourse: A Quantitative Cross-Linguistic Study, ed. By T. Givón. 1–41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haig, Geoffrey, and Stefan Schnell
2016 “The Discourse Basis of Ergativity Revisited.” Language 92 (3): 591–618. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hatcher, Anna G.
1956 “Theme and underlying question: two studies of Spanish word order.” Word 121, Supplement 3, 1–52.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A.
2003 “Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars: Three General Principles.” In The Nature of Explanation in Linguistic Theory, ed. By John Moore and Maria Polinsky, 121–152. Stanford: SLI Publications.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul
1988 “Emergent Grammar and the A Priori Grammar postulate.” In Linguistics in context, ed. By Deborah Tannen, 117–134. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
1998 “Emergent Grammar” In The New Psychology of Language, ed. By Michael Tomasello, 155–175. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F.
2008 “Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models.” Journal of memory and language 59 (4): 434–446. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
1984 “Field Methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation.” In Language in Use: Readings in Sociolinguistics, ed. By John Baugh and Joel Sherzer, 28–53. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Levin, Beth
1993 English Verb Classes and Alternations. A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Levin, Beth, and Malka Rappaport Hovav
1992 “The Lexical Semantics of Verbs of Motion: The Perspective from Unaccusativity.” In Thematic Structure: Its Role in Grammar, ed. By I. M. Roca, 247–269. Berlin/New York: Foris. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewandowski, Wojciech
2007 “Toward a Comparative Analysis of Coming and Going Verbs in Spanish, German, and Polish.” Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. M.A. Thesis.Google Scholar
Lozano, Cristóbal
2006b “The development of the syntax-discourse interface: Greek learners of Spanish.” In The Acquisition of Syntax in Romance Languages, ed. By. Vincent Torrens and Linda Escobar, 371–399. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lozano, Cristóbal, and Amaya Mendikoetxea
2010 “Interface Conditions on Post-Verbal Subjects: A Corpus Study of L2 English.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13 (4): 475–497. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mackenzie, Ian
2006 “Bare Subjects”. In Unaccusative Verbs in Romance Languages, 70–102. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marcos Marín, F.
(Dir.) 1992 Corpus Oral de Referencia de la Lengua Española CORLEC. [URL] (accessed August 2017).
Mayoral Hernández, Roberto
2004a “Importance of weight and argumenthood on the ordering of adverbial expressions.” WCCFL 23 Proceedings. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
2004b “On the Position of Frequency Adverbs in Spanish.” USC Working Papers in Linguistics 21: 1–15.Google Scholar
2005 “A Typological Approach to the Ordering of Adverbials: Weight, Argumenthood and EPP.” Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca “Julio Urquijo” 39 (2): 141–59Google Scholar
2010 “The Locative Alternation: On the Symmetry between Verbal and Prepositional Locative Paradigms.” Probus: International Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics 22 (2): 211. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mayoral Hernández, Roberto, and Lindsey Chen
2006 “Testing for Verb Types in Spanish: An Application of SAS to Corpus Linguistics.” Proceedings of 14th Western Users of SAS Software.Google Scholar
Mendikoetxea, Amaya
1999 “Construcciones Inacusativas y Pasivas.” In Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española, ed. By Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte, vol. II1, 1575–1629. Madrid: Espasa.Google Scholar
Moreno Fernández, Francisco, Ana María Cesteros Mancera, Isabel Martos Molina, and Florentino Paredes García
2001 “El Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y América (PRESEEA): antecedentes, objetivos y estado actual.” [URL]
Morimoto, Yuko
2001 Los Verbos de Movimiento. Madrid: Visor Libros.Google Scholar
Myhill, John
2005 “Quantitative Methods of Discourse Analysis.” In Quantitative linguistics. An international handbook, ed. By Reinhard Köhler, Gabriel Altmann, and Rajmund G. Piotrowski, 471–498. Berlin: de Gruyer.Google Scholar
Naro, Anthony J., and Sebastião J. Votre
1999 “Discourse Motivations for Linguistic Regularities: Verb/Subject Order in Spoken Brazilian Portuguese.” Probus 11 (1): 75–100. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ocampo, Francisco
2005 “The word order of constructions with an intransitive verb, a subject, and an adverb in spoken Spanish.” In Selected proceedings of the 7th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 142–157. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Ocampo, Francisco A.
2009 “El Orden de Palabras en el Español Hablado. La Construcción Sujeto Verbo Objeto Directo: Estudios Dedicados al Profesor Ángel López García.” In La Lingüística como Reto Epistemológico y como Acción Social: Estudios Dedicados al Profesor Ángel López García, ed. By Monserrar V. Rigat, and Enrique S. Alegre, Vol. 11, 501–511. Madrid: Arco Libros.Google Scholar
2014 “El Orden de Palabras en Cláusulas Subordinadas Relativas con un Sujeto y un Verbo Transitivo.” In Perspectives in the Study of Spanish Language Variation, ed. By Enrique-Arias et al. Universidad de Santiago de Compostela.Google Scholar
Orozco, Rafael
2018 “El castellano colombiano en la ciudad de Nueva York: Uso variable de sujetos pronominales.” Studies in Lusophone and Hispanic Linguistics. 11 (1): 89–129. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Otheguy, Ricardo, and Ana Zentella
2012 Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Posio, Pekka
2010 “Influencia del papel semántico en la expresión del sujeto pronominal en español y portugués.” In Actes du XVIIe congrès des romanistes scandinaves/Actas del XVII congreso de romanistas escandinavos, ed. by Jukka Havu, Carita Klippi, Soili Hakulinen, Philippe Jacob, and José Santisteban Fernández, 804–826. Tampereen yliopistopaino.Google Scholar
2012 “The Functions of Post-Verbal Pronominal Subjects in Spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese.” Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 5 (1): 149–190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
R Core Team
2013 “R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing.” R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria. URL [URL]
Rivas, Javier
2008 “La Posición del Sujeto en las Construcciones Monoactanciales del Español: Una Aproximación Funcional.” Hispania 91 (4): 897–912.Google Scholar
Roggia, Aaron B.
2018 “An Investigation of Unaccusativity and Word Order in Mexican Spanish.” Spanish in Context 15 (1): 77–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silva Corvalán, Carmen
1982 “Subject Expression and Placement in Mexican-American Spanish.” In Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic aspects, ed. By Jon Amastae and Lucía Elías-Olivares, 93–120. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sorace, Antonella
2000 “Gradients in Auxiliary Selection with Intransitive Verbs.” Language 761: 859–890. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 “Gradience at the Lexicon-Syntax Interface: Evidence from Auxiliary Selection and Implications for Unaccusativity.” In The Unaccusativity Puzzle: Explorations of the Syntax-Lexicon Interface, ed. By Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Martin Everaert, 243–268. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Suñer, Margarita
1982 Syntax and semantics of Spanish presentational sentence types. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Talmy, Leonard
2000 Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Toward a Cognitive Semantics, vol. 21. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, and Catherine E. Travis
2017 Variationist typology: Shared probabilistic constraints across (non-) null subject languages. Linguistics 53 (7): 653:692.Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Catherine E. Travis
2018 Bilingualism in the Community Code-switching and Grammars in Contact. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Travis, C. E.
2007 “Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation.” Language variation and change 19 (2): 101–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zubizarreta, María L.
1998 Prosody, Focus, and Word Order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar