Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T02:19:52.143Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Macroregional sociolinguistics: Uses and preferences on null direct objects in Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2019

Francisco Moreno-Fernández
Francisco Moreno-Fernández*
Affiliation:
University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Spain Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
*
Author for correspondence: Francisco Moreno-Fernández, Email: francisco.moreno@uah.es
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores two fundamental dimensions in sociolinguistics: the dynamics of linguistic variation and change in international languages and the exploitation of data proceeding from significant countries. These issues will be addressed through examination of a particular syntactic feature and a possible change in progress: the occurrence of null direct objects in Spanish. It is shown that for Spanish, a widely used international language, social factors have not been decisive in explaining the distribution of the phenomenon under investigation. This study shows that while direct object omission is not conditioned by typical social variables such as sex, age, and gender, it is unevenly spread throughout the Spanish-speaking world: Mexico and the continental Caribbean use it more than other countries, such as Spain or Chile. Besides the relevance of geography, some semantic, discourse, and contextual factors are shown as determinant for the direct object omission. Finally, this paper reflects on methodology, specifically the use of a macroregional sociolinguistic method for data analysis as well as the advantages and shortcomings of a specific data collection technique that capitalizes on technological tools with global reach: the internet survey in an international scenario.

Keywords

comparative sociolinguisticsdialectologysurveynull direct objectSpanish
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistic Geography , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , April 2019 , pp. 46 - 60
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arteaga, Deborah (ed.). 2012. Research on Old French: The state of the art. London: Springer.Google Scholar
Astorgano Abajo, Antonio. 2010. Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735-1809). Toledo: Almud Ediciones.Google Scholar
Bartoli, Matteo & Bertoldi, Giulio. 1925. Breviario di neolinguistica. Modena: Società tipografica modenese.Google Scholar
Birdsong, David. 1989. Metalinguistic performance and interlinguistic competence. New York: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, Joan & Ford, Marilyn. 2010. Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English. Language 86(1). 186–213.Google Scholar
Brucart, Josep Maria. 1999. La ellipsis. In Bosque, Ignacio & Demonte, Violeta (dirs.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 2787–2865. Madrid: Espasa.Google Scholar
Camacho, José, Paredes, Liliana & Sánchez, Liliana. 1997. Null objects in Bilingual Andean Spanish. In Hughes, Elizabeth, Hughes, Mary, and Greenhill, Annabel (eds.), Proceedings of the 21st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol 1. 55–66. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Campos, Héctor. 1986. Indefinite object drop. Linguistic Inquiry 17. 354–359.Google Scholar
Cano, Rafael. 1981. Estructuras sintácticas del español actual. Madrid: Gredos.Google Scholar
Cameron, Richard. 1992. Pronominal and null subject variation in Spanish: Constraints, dialects, and functional compensation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania PhD Thesis.Google Scholar
Carvalho, Ana M., Orozco, Rafael & Shin, Naomi L.. 2015. Spanish subject pronoun expression: A cross-dialectal perspective. Washington. D.C: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Cervantes, Miguel de. 1605. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote La Mancha. Madrid.Google Scholar
Claes, Jeroen. 2014. Sociolingüística comparada y gramática de construcciones: Un acercamiento a la pluralización de haber presentacional en las capitals antillanas. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 27(2). 338–364.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Claes, Jeroen. 2016. Cognitive, social, and individual constraints on linguistic variation. Berlin: De Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clements, J. Clancy. 2006. Null direct objects in Spanish. In Clements, J. Clancy and Yoon, Jiyoung (eds.), Functional approaches to Spanish syntax, 134–150. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clyne, Michael (ed.). 1992. Pluricentric languages: Differing norms and different nations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Costa, João, Lobo, María, Carmona, Jaqueline & Silva, Carmen. 2008. Clitic omission in European Portuguese: Correlation with null objects? In Gavarró, A., and Freitas, M.J. (eds.), Language Acquisition and Development: Proceedings of GALA 2007, 133–143. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.Google Scholar
Cummins, Sarah & Roberge, Yves. 2004. Null objects in French and English. In Auger, J., Clements, C., and Vance, B., eds., Contemporary approaches to romance linguistics, 121–138. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cyrino, Sonia. 1997. O objeto nulo no Português do Brasil. Londrina: UEL.Google Scholar
Choi, Jinny K. 2000. [-Person] direct object drop: The genetic cause of a syntactic feature in Paraguayan Spanish. Hispania 83. 531–543.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John. 1987. The discourse basis of ergativity. Language 63. 805–855.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernández de Castro, Félix. 2015. La “simplificación” morfosintáctica en el español americano. In Santamaría, Vicente Gotor (ed.), Studium Grammaticae. Homenaje al professor José A. Martínez, 285–304. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 2001. Patient arguments of causative verbs can be omitted: The role of information structure in argument distribution. Language Science 23. 503–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gómez Seibane, Sara. 2012. Los pronombre átonos (le, la, lo) en el español: Aproximación histórica. Madrid: Arco/Libros.Google Scholar
Kany, Charles. 1945. American-Spanish syntax. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kloss, Heinz. 1978. Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen seit 1800, 2nd edn. Düsseldorf: Schwann.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1982. Building on empirical foundations. In Lehmann, W., and Malkiel, Y. (eds.), Perspectives on Historical Linguistics, 17–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud & Lemoine, Kevin. 1996. Vers une grammaire des compléments zéro en français parlé. In Chuquet, J., and Frid, M. (eds.), Absence de marques et représentation de l’absence, 279–309. Travaux Linguistiques du Cerlico 9, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.Google Scholar
Landa, Miren Alazne. 1995. Conditions on null objects in Basque Spanish and their relation to leísmo and clitic doubling. Los Angeles: University of Southern California dissertation.Google Scholar
Larjavaara, Meri. 2000. Présence ou absence de l’objet. Limites du possible en français contemporain. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica.Google Scholar
Lima Baretto, Evenice Ramos. 2010. Objeto nulo, clítico e pronome pleno no português brasileiro. Revista Philologus 48. 112–123.Google Scholar
Luraghi, Silvia. 1997. Omission of the direct object on Classical Latin. Indogermanische Forschungen 102. 239–257.Google Scholar
Luraghi, Silvia. 1998. Omissione dell’oggetto directto in frasi coordinate: Dal latino all’italiano. In Ramat, P. (ed.), Sintassi storica. Atti del XXX Congresso SLI, 183–196. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar
Luraghi, Silvia. 2013. Clitics. In Luraghi, S., and Parodi, C. (eds.), The Bloomsbury companion to syntax, 165–193. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Martín-Butragueño, Pedro. 1994. Hacia una tipología de la variación gramatical en sociolingüística del español. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 42(1). 29–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masullo, Pascual José. 2003. Clitic-less definite object drop in River Plate Spanish. Bloomington, IN: LSRL XXXIII Google Scholar
Mateu, Victoria Eugenia. 2015. Object Clitic Omission in Child Spanish: Evaluating Representational and Processing Accounts. Language Acquisition 22. 240–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Medina López, Javier. 2000. El español de canarias en su dimensión atlántica: aspectos históricos y lingüísticos. Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch.Google Scholar
Moreno-Fernández, Francisco. 2005. Project for the sociolinguistic study of Spanish from Spain and America (PRESEEA): A corpus with a grammar and discourse bias. In Takagaki, Y., Zaima, S., Tsuruga, Y., Moreno-Fernandez, F., and Kawaguchi, Y. (eds.), Corpus-Based Approaches to Sentence Structures, 265–288. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moreno-Fernández, Francisco. 2016. La lengua española en su geografía, 3rd. edn. Madrid: Arco/Libros.Google Scholar
Moreno-Fernández, Francisco. 2017. A framework for cognitive sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Morgan, Terrell A. 2004. An overview of Paraguayan Spanish. Las Vegas: LASA 2004 Google Scholar
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2003. Grammar is grammar and usage is usage. Language 79. 682–707.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palacios, Azucena. 1998. Variación sintáctica en el sistema pronominal del español paraguayo. Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica XIV. 451–474.Google Scholar
Palacios, Azucena. 2000. El sistema pronominal del español paraguayo: un caso de contacto de lenguas. In Calvo, J. (ed.), Teoría y práctica del contacto: el español de América en el candelero, 123–43. Madrid: Iberoamericana.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paredes, Liliana. 1996. The Spanish continuum in Peruvian bilingual speakers: A study of verbal clitics. Los Angeles: University of Southern California dissertation.Google Scholar
RAE-ASALE. 2009–2011. Nueva gramática de la lengua Española. Madrid: Espasa.Google Scholar
Raposo, Eduardo. 1984. The null object in Portuguese. Los Angeles: Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages Google Scholar
Raposo, Eduardo. 1986. On the null object in European Portuguese. In Jaeggli, O., and Silva-Corvalán, C. (eds.), Studies in Romance linguistics, 373–90. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Reig Alamillo, Asela & Schwenter, Scott A.. 2007. Null objects and neuter lo: A cross-dialectal variationist analysis. In Holmquist, J., Lorenzino, A., and Sayahi, L. (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the third Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, 113–121. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Reig-Alamillo, Asela. 2008. Cross-dialectal variability in propositional anaphora: A quantitative and pragmatic study of null objects in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University dissertation.Google Scholar
Reig-Alamillo, Asela. 2009. Cross-dialectal variation in propositional anaphora: Null objects and propositional lo in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Language Variation and Change 21. 381–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sainzmaza-Lecanda, Lorena & Schwenter, Scott A.. 2017. Null objects with and without bilingualism in the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking world. In Bellamy, K., Child, M.W., González, O., Muntendam, A., and Parafita Couto, M.C. (eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone world, 95–119. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sánchez-Ayala, Ivo and Rivas, Javier. 2015. Null direct objects in Spanish conversation. Hispanic Research Journal 16(2). 107–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sánchez, Liliana. 1999. Null Objects in Contact varieties of Spanish. In Authier, J.-M, Reed, L., and Bullock, B. (eds.), Formal Perspectives on Romance Linguistics, 227–242. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sankoff, David, Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Smith, Eric (2015). Goldvarb Yosemite: A variable rule application for Macintosh. Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Schütze, Carson T. 1996. The Empirical Base of Linguistics. Grammaticality Judgements and Linguistic Methodology. Chicago: The Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. &and Silva, Gláucia. 2002. Overt vs. null direct objects in spoken Brazilian Portuguese: A semantic/pragmatic. Hispania 85(3). 577–586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. 2006. Null object across South America. In Face, T.L., and Klee, C.A. (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 8th Hispanic Linguistic Symposium, 23–36. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott. 2011. Variationist approaches to Spanish morphosyntax: Internal and external factors. In Díaz-Campos, Manuel (ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, 123–147. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen & Enrique-Arias, Andrés. 2017. Sociolingüística y pragmática del español, 2nd edn. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Soares da Silva, Augusto (ed.). 2014. Pluricentrity: Language variation and sociocognitive dimensions. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Suñer, Margarita & Yépez, María. 1988. Null definite objects in Quiteño. Linguistic Inquiry 14. 561–565.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali. 2002. Comparative sociolinguistics. In Chambers, J.K., Trudgill, P., and Schilling-Estes, N. (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 729–763. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Thompson, Robert W. 1992. Spanish as a pluricentric language. In Clyne, M., Pluricentric languages: Differing norms and different nations, 45–70. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Urrutia Cárdenas, Hernán & Ulloa, Teresa Fernández. 1997. Supresión del clítico acusativo de tercera persona en español: América y País Vasco. Boletín de Filología de la Universidad de Chile 36. 287–336.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt & Fasold, Ralph 1974. The study of social dialects in American English. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Moreno-Fernández supplementary material

Moreno-Fernández supplementary material 1

Download Moreno-Fernández supplementary material(File)
File 9.4 KB