A Minimalist approach to gender agreement in the Afro-Bolivian DP: Variation and the specification of uninterpretable features

Abstract

This article analyzes gender-agreement variation in the Determiner Phrase (DP) of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS). We claim that this is an instance of crossgenerational change, consisting in the systematic substitution of stigmatized basilectal Afro-Bolivian features with more prestigious Bolivian Spanish ones. In light of recent minimalist models, the variability encountered in the corpus can be accounted for systematically as a by-product of the differential specification of uninterpretable features in a derivation. This study highlights an on-going process of post-bozal Spanish approximation to a more prestigious Spanish variety. Such transition seems to be driven by social factors and is significantly regulated by syntactic constraints.