El proceso de analogía en los adverbios locativos del español: nuevos datos y descripción del fenómeno

This work investigated whether Mexican-American bilingual children and Mexican monolingual children (ages 4–6; N = 245) use Spanish varieties (Puerto Rican vs. Mexican) when making friendship judgments for themselves (1st person) and/or for others (3rd person), and whether children prioritize dialect varieties over race and gender categories. On a dialect discrimination task, both groups of children distinguished between the Spanish varieties. When choosing a friend for themselves (1st person judgments), both groups of children preferred a character who spoke their own dialect (Mexican Spanish over Puerto Rican Spanish), but only when gender and race were held constant; this preference was stronger for monolingual Mexican children than for bilingual Mexican-American children. In contrast, neither group used dialect cues to guide judgments about others’ friendship preferences (3rd person). For Mexican monolingual children, their friendship judgments (on both 1st and 3rd person tasks, when gender and race were held constant) were related to their ability to discriminate between the dialects, but this was not the case for bilinguals. Finally, neither group made use of dialect variety in their social judgments when this factor was pitted against a character’s gender or race. Instead, both groups predominantly used gender as a basis for friendship judgments. These results indicate an early sensitivity to linguistic dialect in young children’s social judgments, as well as boundary conditions on the use of this information. The findings also reveal differences in children’s use of dialect cues as a function of the linguistic and cultural context in which they live in.

The current study analyzes mood alternation in Spanish spoken in Georgia among first-generation Mexican immigrants. Using sociolinguistic interview data, tokens of the subjunctive and indicative in dependent clauses were examined, particularly in the following syntactic contexts:depender, aunque, me gusta que, no porque, quizás, tal vez,andno sé si/ cómo/dónde/qué. We argue that mood selection in the contexts under study is determined by the evaluation of the proposition in the dependent clause. We then use this data to inform theories of possible world semantics (i.e.,Anand and Hacquard 2013;Giannakidou and Mari 2021;Villalta 2008) to better understand mood alternation. Moreover, while many U.S. Spanish varieties may demonstrate what Silva-Corvalán (1994, 91) refers to as “a reduced system that made it more difficult to distinguish between more or less possible situations in a hypothetical world,” we show that cases of alternation in the present data still differentiate speaker meaning and evaluation.

The current article explores the linguistic attitudes of thirteen Cuban migrants residing temporarily in migrants’ shelters in Mexico. This case study aims to demonstrate their posture towards the change in language variety and lexicon as they integrate into Mexican society. It sought to examine their positive and negative affective attitudes towards Mexican Spanish through a semi structured questionnaire and qualitative analysis of recorded interviews. The findings reveal similarities and differences in the Cubans’ desire to maintain or change their Spanish variety, highlighting the influence of migratory more than the social factors on their language decisions.

This study investigates the contemporary grammaticalized uses of perdón (‘sorry’) in two varieties of Spanish, namely Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Methodologically, the investigation is based on a taxonomy of offenses, organized around the concept of ‘face’ and based on spoken data of Spanish from Mexico and Spain. This taxonomy turns out to be a fruitful methodological tool for the analysis of apologetic markers: it does not only offer usage-based evidence for previous theorizing concerning the grammaticalization process of apologetic markers, but also leads to a refinement of these previous results from a contrastive point of view. Evidence from both corpora suggests a more advanced stage in the grammaticalization process of perdón in Mexican Spanish, where it can be used not only as a self-face-saving device geared towards the positive face of the speaker, but also in turn-taking contexts oriented towards the negative face of the interlocutor. Peninsular Spanish, on the other hand, resorts to a more varied gamut of apologetic markers in these contexts.

This work further investigates the use of a complementizer-like particle que in Spanish with a reportative meaning. The reportative QUE in Mexican Spanish shows an unparalleled behavior as an evidential: it is the only Spanish variety—considering Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula—in which que may appear preceding nonclausal constituents DP, NP, and PP. It will be further shown here that this unexpected property must obey two prosodic restrictions: a pause and a certain intonational pattern are mandatory when the nonclausal constituent is postverbal. Even though the reportative QUE may acquire modal overtones (of doubt or [ad]mirativity), it is not inherently modal, unlike the adverbial dizque and the Mexican innovation según que, which are inherently modal. It is proposed here that the Mexican reportative QUE is the natural extension of the complementizer que of verba dicendi; it is also contended that QUE becomes a grammaticalized reportative evidential.

This study is the first variationist analysis of subject personal pronoun expression (SPE) in the Spanish of Xalapa, Mexico. The overall pronominal rate (25%)—the highest such rate found in Mexican Spanish so far—also constitutes one of the highest in a mainland Spanish variety. Six predictors—four internal and two external—significantly condition SPE. The internal conditioning—congruent with what occurs elsewhere—reveals grammatical number and person of the subject as the strongest predictor. It also shows that verb class has tendencies similar to those found in other communities. However, further analysis uncovers that lexical frequency provides more definite answers regarding how verbs condition SPE, as within the copulative verb class category ser ‘be’ favors overt subjects but estar ‘be’ favors null subjects. Moreover, the unusually robust effect of age sets Xalapa Spanish apart from most other varieties. Interestingly, the pronominal rate among teenagers (11%)—below the lowest overall pronominal rate anywhere—is consistent with what occurs in other Spanish varieties such as Colombian, European, Dominican, and Mexican. These findings call for further research on the effects of verb semantics and age on SPE.

In this article I would like to talk about one of the results of the cohabitation of Spanish and indigenous languages in Mexico: the presence of loanwords of Nahuatl origin in Mexican Spanish. For this purpose I will present the results of my research, whose aim was to collect words of Nahuatl origin in the newspapers of Veracruz, one of the states of Mexico; and to show the importance of this type of vocabulary in Mexican Spanish. The use of indigenous words is a characteristic feature of almost all Spanish varieties spoken in America, and Mexican Spanish is no different. The vitality of the lexicon of Nahuatl origin in Mexican Spanish can be demonstrated by the fact that it has been used in journalistic texts on very different subjects: society, economy, politics, culture, gastronomy, etc. Journalistic language, as it is well-known, is a dynamic and constantly changing type of language, so the constant presence of words of Nahuatl origin there shows that this kind of vocabulary constitutes an integral part of the Spanish spoken in Mexico.

Teachers attending summer institutes were asked to react to different varieties of English and Spanish. The teachers participating in the ESL and Applied Sociolinguistics Institutes evaluated four varieties of English: (a) standard American English, (b) Hispanicized English, (c) ungrammatical English, and (d) English/Spanish code alternation. The teachers participating in the Bilingual Institute judged four varieties of Spanish: (a) standard Mexican Spanish, (b) local Spanish, (c) ungrammatical Spanish, and (d) English/Spanish code alternation. All three groups of teachers rated each variety in terms of its appropriateness for the classroom, degree of correctness, and the speaker's academic potential. The teachers ranked the English and Spanish varieties on a standard continuum. Teachers from the Bilingual Institute differentiated among the four Spanish varieties, while teachers in the ESL and Applied Sociolinguistics Institutes did not judge code switching less favorably than ungrammatical English. Some of the notions that teachers held about Spanish varieties were influenced by Spanish proficiency, ethnicity, and birthplace. Knowledge about language use in bilingual contexts did influence the teachers' level of tolerance toward marked English varieties, suggesting that some attitudes toward nonstandard speech styles are influenced by cognitive and motivational considerations.

El presente trabajo ofrece una nueva visión de la forma adverbial cercas, propia del español de México, así como de las creencias sociales asociadas a su uso, aceptabilidad y distribución geográfica. En primer lugar, se presenta una descripción general de este adverbio, su comportamiento gramatical y sus valores, así como la documentación histórica del fenómeno, que sugiere un auge y empleo modernos en español. Se sostiene que esta forma no se trata de una ‘pluralización’ del adverbio cerca, sino que es el resultado de un proceso de analogía morfológica, tal y como ha ocurrido con otros adverbios con -s (quizá > quizás). Los datos recogidos en la encuesta realizada en línea (respondida por 848 hablantes nativos mexicanos) demuestran que: a) el adverbio cercas es una forma estigmatizada en el español mexicano; b) quienes la rechazan (83 % de los informantes que reconocieron su existencia) aducen razones normativas, educativas o sociolectales; c) la mayoría de los informantes que hacen uso de esta forma son jóvenes (18-30 años), hablantes que tradicionalmente suelen apartarse de la norma estándar; d) el 58 % de los participantes considera que las formas cerca y cercas presentan un significado diferente, aunque se constata la falta de fijación del sentido de cercas; para el 42 % restante se trataría de un mismo adverbio con distintas formas (diferenciadas por la presencia del sufijo adverbial -s); y e) al correlacionar los datos sociodemográficos (edad, sexo) con las respuestas sobre la aceptación, el uso y los valores del adverbio cercas, se aprecian diferencias estadísticamente significativas.

This study examined different degrees of awareness regarding the stigmatization of Southern California (SoCal) Spanish across four groups of Spanish–English bilinguals from Southern California (n = 87). The participants were presented with Spanish sentences and asked to decide which profile of speaker would likely express that sentence, given six options, such as: “someone living in Los Angeles/SoCal who grew up in Mexico” or “a Spanish-English bilingual who grew up in Los Angeles/SoCal”. Experimental stimuli included seven different linguistic categories of stigmatization, including English contact forms. The participants tended to attribute the stigmatized forms to bilinguals who grew up in Southern California. Central Colloquial and Taboo categories were more salient and perceived as forms used by people in Mexico. In contrast, English borrowings and redundancies seemed to be recognized by the participants, particularly for simultaneous bilinguals who grew up in Southern California, as salient forms of an identified Southern California Spanish variety. The results are interpreted within Exemplar Theory, with certain stigmatized forms indexing “Mexican Spanish” exemplars, and English borrowings identified as exemplars of SoCal Spanish. We advocate for usage-based approaches to understanding language perceptions and critical approaches to interrogating academic discourses.

This paper investigates metalinguistic concepts and language attitudes toward Mexican Spanish varieties and Spanish-Amerindian language contact in Oaxaca, Mexico. Theoretical-methodological approaches from Perceptual Dialectology and Metapragmatic Sociolinguistics are used to analyze non-linguists’ views of linguistic variation and their prestige attributions in the multilingual communicative space of southern Mexico. On the data basis of semi-narrative interviews with speakers from the metropolitan region of Oaxaca, we discuss the results of a discourse analysis of these perceptions. The results show a tripartite division of the Oaxacan dialectal space with sporadic mention of salient linguistic features for each conceptualized variational space, an overt prestige for the urban Oaxacan variety and its close link to the Mexico City standard, and a negative attitude toward linguistic interferences coming from Spanish-indigenous language contacts.

Summary The paper deals with selected problems of the verbalization of the concepts “place”, “space” and “direction”, with a special consideration of their successive development in language and in language acquisition. The theoretical background are assumptions concerning the genesis of the concept of place and movement. Some of them claim that movement and direction precede the conceptualization of place and space. However, numerous linguistic phenomena seem to prove the opposite hypothesis, namely that the concept of place and, thus, its verbalization by means of stative verbs, local adverbs and prepositional phrases is original, whereas the concepts of movement, especially of controlled, caused movement denoted by transitive, regular verbs is derived from the concept of locum encoded by irregular verbs.

Beyond binaries in address research: Politeness and identity practices in interaction shifts the focus of address studies away from the traditional T/V opposition and toward a more flexible, contextually situated framework. The volume brings together linguistic phenomena that do not fit neatly within the formal/informal duality. The chapters explore several languages, including European Portuguese, Spanish varieties, Caribbean Dutch, Swedish, German, Bosnian, Hungar-ian, and Syrian Arabic. The analytical approaches are equally diverse, challenging binary dis-tinctions through quantitative methods such as survey response analysis, attitudinal experi-ments using the Matched Guise Test, data clustering, and qualitative analyses of interaction and metadiscourse. The ten chapters are accompanied by an introduction that situates the discussion within the broader critique of binary approaches to address over time. This book will interest scholars engaged in address research, broadly defined to include socio-linguistics, language variation and change, pragmatics, politeness studies, comparative linguis-tics, and intercultural communication.

The aim of this article is, on one hand, to talk about the language contacts between Mexican Spanish and the indigenous languages of Mexico, more specifically Nahuatl; on the other hand, to introduce the linguistic phenomenon of Nahuatl loanwords and their presence in the Mexican literature from diachronic point of view.

The use of both production and perceptual data has the potential to provide a more complete picture of linguistic phenomena than would otherwise be the case, including when exploring regional linguistic variation. Utilizing the social networking platform Twitter and an online survey, this paper reports on a descriptive analysis of the geographic distribution of a less-commonly used syntactic form of the Spanish verbgustar‘to like, to please’, referred to as experientialgustar(e.g.,cuando gustes‘when you’d like’). The results from the analysis of 6,686 tweets together with the responses of 81 native Spanish-speaking participants in an online survey suggest that experientialgustaris produced and is perceived to be produced most often in Mexican Spanish, despite not being exclusive to that country. The paper contributes to the literature depicting the benefit of using both production and perceptual data in the study of dialectal variation, as well as to the literature documenting language variation in Spanish.