Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-Dialectal Perspective
Much recent scholarship has sought to identify the linguistic and social factors that
favor the expression or omission of subject pronouns in Spanish. This volume brings
together leading experts on the topic of language variation in Spanish to provide
a panoramic view of research trends, develop probabilistic models of grammar, and
investigate the impact of language contact on pronoun expression.
The book consists of three sections. The first studies the distributional patterns
and conditioning forces on subject pronoun expression in four monolingual varieties―Dominican,
Colombian, Mexican, and Peninsular―and makes cross-dialectal comparisons. In the second
section, experts explore Spanish in contact with English, Maya, Catalan, and Portuguese
to determine the extent to which each language influences this syntactic variable.
The final section examines the acquisition of variable subject pronoun expression
among monolingual and bilingual children as well as adult second language learners.