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Article In: Spanish in Context: Online-First Articles

Frequency and phonological effects on variable noun-adjective order in a spontaneous-speech corpus of Venezuelan Spanish

ORCiD logo with link | California State University, FresnoFresno
ORCiD logo with link | University of Pittsburgh
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Abstract
Adjective position in Spanish offers a window into how multiple levels of the grammar interact in shaping variable structures. Using a corpus of spontaneous Venezuelan speech, we extracted all noun-adjective pairings for 10 adjectives that permitted variation between pre- and post-position in prior research, yielding 928 variable tokens. Tokens were coded for differences in the syllable length and lexical frequency of the adjective relative to the noun, in addition to the adjective’s semantic class. Results showed that for these adjectives pre-position occurred at a rate of 44.94%, consistent with prior cross-dialectal trends. Mixed-effects modeling demonstrated that adjectives lighter and more frequent than the modified noun significantly favored pre-position, and there was no significant difference across these semantic classes. These findings highlight the interplay of phonological and frequency factors in adjective placement and suggest that frequent pairings may have been reanalyzed as entrenched units, consistent with usage-based approaches to grammar building.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Usage-based approaches and analyses of variable structures
    • 2.2Theoretical descriptions of adjective position in Spanish
    • 2.3The role of phonology and processing-based constraints
    • 2.4Empirical analyses of adjective position
  • 3.Current study
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1The corpus
    • 4.2Data coding and analysis
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions, limitations, and future directions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
References (56)
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