¡Tú no me hables! Pronoun expression in conflict narratives

Abstract

In their sociolinguistic analyses of the variable use of Spanish subject personal pronouns, researchers have noted that pronominal expression is conditioned by several linguistic and social variables such as a change in subject referent, the semantic class and person and number of the verb, formality of speech and speaker age. Recent studies have also reported that pronominal expression is also influenced by a speaker's exposure to English and contact with other Spanish varieties that exhibit elevated uses of overt pronominals. Based on Grimshaw's (Conflict talk, Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Labov and Fanshel's (Therapeutic discourse: Psychotherapy as conversation, Academic Press, 1977) tenets regarding conflict talk, in which they note that conflict involves speech acts such as defenses, retreats and challenges, and on Brenneis (Telling troubles, Oxford University Press, 1996), who maintains that the contents of conflict narratives are intertwined with the “narrator, audience, purposes and expectations”, this study hypothesizes that the presence of conflict in narratives mediates subject pronoun expression. It is posited here that because conflict contains such features, its presence will affect singular and plural subject pronoun forms, and it will strongly compete with the effect that another strong variable (a change in subject referent) has on pronominal expression. It is also posited that the robust effect that conflict exerts on pronominals will be attested in all speakers regardless of age.