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In Dominican Spanish, speakers produce the marker /‑(e)se/ to turn singulars arroz and gallina into the plurals arrócese and gallínase. Núñez Cedeño (2003) proposed that grammar alone is insufficient to account for its distribution. He introduced an information structure explanation suggesting that pragmatic factors guided speakers in selecting specific grammatical contexts to insert a /‑(e)se/ plural [instead of a /‑(e)s/ plural]. Colina (2006) proposed an alternative optimality analysis arguing that the regular plural is formed on a plural /‑s/ regulated by a constraint which prevents it from surfacing. This paper proposes a three-pronged approach to counter previous analyses. Firstly, it shows that the ‘double plural’ does not exist and that /‑e/, not /‑s/, signals plural formation. Secondly, this analysis shows that previous accounts relying on focused constituents only cannot hold because /‑se/ realization occurs both in focus and topic positions. Thirdly, based on the Expressive Morphology hypothesis, this article proposes that /‑se/ is an expressive morphological marker used under some restricted morpho-phonological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how and why change occurs is a persistent theme in research on language contact and sociolinguistics. In this article, I investigate the role of social context in producing change and maintenance in a contact variety of Andean Spanish. Two generations of speakers in a Quechua-Spanish contact zone in central Bolivia interpret stress shift on the first person imperfect past tense as a marker of the "reminiscent past." An emergent but unstable grammatical distinction is entwined with lived experience and speakers' positioning as social actors. Both stability and change are produced by speakers through practice and are closely related to the iconization of contact features as symbols of social orientation and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This investigation extends the research on the use of Spanish copulas ser and estar in Venezuela to all [copula + adjective] contexts (see De Jonge 1993; Malaver 2000 for work on expressions of age). Findings reveal that resultant state, adjective class, predicate type, experience with the referent, susceptibility to change, socioeconomic level, age and frame of reference are included in the statistical model as strong predictors of estar. The analysis of the social factors shows that copula choice in Venezuelan Spanish does not show the typical S-curve pattern to strongly support an analysis of change in progress. The history of copula choice in the language suggests a development with long periods of stability and the strong conditioning of linguistic factors. Copula choice in Venezuelan Spanish shows signs that it is slowly advancing and that younger and older speakers are at different stages in this grammatical change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Spanish, standard sentences such as Pienso que no vendrá ‘I think s/he will not come’ and No se acordó de que tenía que ir ‘S/he forgot s/he had to go’ can alternate respectively with non-standard sentences as Pienso de que no vendrá (dequeísmo) and No se acordó ø que tenía que ir (queísmo). In order to explain both syntactic processes scholars have proposed different hypotheses: psycholinguistic, functional, social and psychosocial. The aim of this research is to analyse the validity of the functional hypothesis (this is, the possibility that the de/ø alternation conveys a semantic and/or pragmatic meaning) on a corpus recorded in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Canary Islands). With the purpose of verifying such hypothesis, four variables have been analysed: the verb person of the main clause, the verb tense of the main clause, the source, direction and distance of the information (evidence), and the syntactic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]