Subject pronoun placement as evidence of contact and leveling in Spanish in New York

Abstract

This sociolinguistic analysis of Spanish overt subject pronouns examines their placement either before or after verbs in a corpus of interviews with Spanish-speaking New Yorkers. The variable placement of subject pronouns responds to a number of linguistic and speaker variables which have not been defined for any dialect of Spanish. In New York, this variability seems to be additionally influenced by English and by the contact of different dialects of Spanish. By analyzing the role that the speakers' socio-demographic characteristics plays on pronoun placement, I observe, for pronoun placement, the same processes of language and dialect contact documented in previous research with regard to the presence and absence of the pronoun, and I interpret them as supporting the hypotheses that language contact and dialect leveling are active forces shaping Spanish in New York. I further note that generative parametric theory can suggest an account of the concomitant changes observed in rates of preposing and overtness in Spanish in New York. My analysis also shows that, in the face of important contact and leveling changes taking place in the City, the speaker's region of origin continues to be the prevailing factor giving form to pronominal usage in Spanish in New York.