Person marking in the wake of /s/ deletion in Andalusian Spanish

Abstract

ABSTRACTData on person marking in Andalusian Spanish argue in favor of a revision of the functional hypothesis, which pertains to “the tendency for semantically relevant information to be retained in surface structure” (Kiparsky, 1982:87). The first part of this study shows that subject pronouns in Andalusian are not used to disambiguate verb forms, in direct contrast to Hochberg's (1986) findings on subject pronoun usage in Puerto Rican. In the second part of the study, an analysis of contextual person markers, not undertaken in previous studies, shows that person can be indicated by means outside the surface structure. When both linguistic and contextual person markers are taken into account, only 2% of the 1,035 verbs in this sample of Andalusian are unmarked for person. Person marking is thus maintained where it is important to the speaker's message, but it is not limited to surface structure realization as the strong form of the functional hypothesis suggests.