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Article published In:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 20:3 (2023) ► pp.438–463

Los puertorriqueños se les está cayendo la “a”

Variably marked datives in Puerto Rican Spanish

ORCID logo | Penn State University

This study addresses a gap in the extensive literature on Spanish indirect objects by offering a study of unmarked datives (i.e., Ø eso le pones un papel de aluminio ‘to that you put an aluminum foil’; PRESEEA 2001). Analyzed are the linguistic constraints on the variable absence of dative marker a ‘to’ in corpora of spoken Puerto Rican Spanish, in which the rate of marker absence is 33% (n = 380). Results of logistic regression analysis reveal that unmarked datives occurred with low frequency, non-prototypical dative verbs. Inanimate referents favored the absence of the dative marker, as did complex DPs, where the dative phrase and the clitic pronoun+verb are not adjacent. The findings are discussed from the twin perspectives of analogy as a mechanism of change and frequency effects: unmarked datives seem to most affect items at the margins of the dative category, in terms of both verbs and referents.

Keywords: dative structure, unmarked datives, language variation, corpora
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Variability in dative constructions
    • 2.1Unmarked datives in (Puerto Rican) Spanish
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpora
    • 3.2Extraction and coding procedure
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.20045.vel
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