Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T07:21:25.020Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The gendered use of salirse in Mexican Spanish: Si me salía yo con las amigas, se enojaba

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2004

JESSI ELANA AARON
JESSI ELANA AARON
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, MSC03 21001, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, jaaron@unm.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

It has been claimed that women and men use language quite differently in social interaction. Combining a functional and cognitive approach to grammar, this article explores the ways in which men and women use the optional pronominal form of the Spanish verb salir(se) ‘to leave’ in Mexican Spanish. It is found that women use the pronominal form notably more than men, and that, diachronically, this form has traditionally been applied to women's behavior. It is hypothesized that these patterns demonstrate both the relative expressive freedom of women's speech and the socially constrained nature of expectations for female behavior in colonial and contemporary Mexican society. It is shown how culturally shaped conventional construals of gender can both be reflected in and influence morphosyntactic phenomena.I would like to thank Melissa Axelrod, Kathy McKnight, Language in Society editor Jane Hill, and two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions on this article.

Keywords

Spanishgenderenergetic constructions.
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 585 - 607
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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

REFERENCES

Aaron, Jessi Elana (2003). Me salí a caminar: Pronominal constructions with intransitive motion verbs in northern New Mexican Spanish. In Lofti Sayahi (ed.), Selected proceedings of the First Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, 123–33. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Aguilar, Pepe (1992). Recuérdame Bonito. Musart.
Arenal, Electa, & Schlau, Stacey (1989). Untold sisters: Hispanic nuns in their own works. Trans. Amanda Powell. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Barlow, Michael, & Kemmer, Suzanne (eds.) (2000). Usage-based models of language. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Benot, Eduardo (1910). Arte de hablar, gramática filosófica de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Librería de los Sucesores de Hernando.
Boyer, Richard (1991). Las mujeres, la “mala vida” y la política del matrimonio. In Asunción Lavrin (ed.), Sexualidad y matrimonio en la América hispánica: siglos XVI–XVIII, 271–308. México, D.F.: Grijalbo.
Butt, John, & Benjamin, Carmen (2000). A new reference grammar of modern Spanish. Malta: NTC Publishing Group.
Cameron, Deborah (1998). Performing gender identity: Young men's talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In Coates 1998, 270–84.
Chinchilla, Rosa Helena (1996). La voz acallada de la mujer en dos crónicas de la Nueva España. In Mabel Moraña (ed.), Mujer y cultura en la colonia hispanoamericana, 35–49. Pittsburgh: Biblioteca de América, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, University of Pittsburgh.
Coates, Jennifer (1993). Women, men and language: A sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language. 2nd ed. London: Pearson Education.
Coates, Jennifer (1998) (ed.). Language and gender: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Company Company, Concepción (1994). Documentos lingüísticos de la Nueva España: Altiplano central. México: UNAM.
Covarrubias Horozco, Sebastian de (1943). Tesoro de la lengua Castellana o Española: Según la impresión de 1611, con las adiciones de Benito Remigio Noydens publicadas en la de 1674. Ed. Martín de Riquer. Barcelona: S.A. Horta.
Diller, Anthony V.N., & Khanittanan, Wilaiwan (2002). Syntactic enquiry as a cultural activity. In N. J. Enfield (ed.), Ethnosyntax: Explorations in grammar and culture, 31–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eckert, Penelope (1998). Gender and sociolinguistic variation. In Coates 1998, 64–75.
Eckert, Penelope, & McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1998). Communities of practice: Where language, gender, and power all live. In Coates 1998, 484–94.
Enfield, N. J. (2002). Ethnosyntax: Introduction. In N. J. Enfield (ed.), Ethnosyntax: Explorations in grammar and culture, 3–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
García, Erica C. (1975). The role of theory in linguistic analysis: The Spanish pronoun system. New York: American Elsevier.
Gonzalbo, Pilar (1985) (ed.). La educación de la mujer en la Nueva España. México, D.F.: Ediciones el Caballito, Secretaria de Educación Pública.
Gutiérrez, M. J., & Silva-Corvalán, Carmen (1993). Spanish clitics in a contact situation. In Ana Roca & John M. Lipski (eds.), Spanish in the United States: Linguistic contact and diversity, 75–89. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hopper, Paul, & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (1993). Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kemmer, Suzanne (1994). Middle voice, transitivity and the elaboration of events. In Barbara Fox & Paul Hopper (eds.), Voice: Form and function, 179–230. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Klaiman, Miriam Holly (1992). Middle verbs, reflexive middle constructions, and middle voice. Studies in Language 16:35–61.Google Scholar
Lagarriga Attias, Isabel (1996). Algunas concepciones populares sobre la locura femenina en México. In La mujer en México: una perspectiva antropológica, 87–95. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1994). Culture, cognition, and grammar. In Martin Pütz (ed.), Language contact and language conflict, 25–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lara Ramos, Luis Fernando de (1996). Diccionario del español usual en México. México: Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Lingüísticos y Literarios.
Lope Blanch, Juan M. (1976) (ed.). El habla popular de la Ciudad de México. Materiales para su estudio. México: UNAM.
Maldonado, Ricardo (1989). Se gramaticalizó: A Diachronic account of energetic reflexives in Spanish. In Proceedings of the Fourth Meeting of the Pacific Linguistics Conference. Eugene: University of Oregon, Dept. of Linguistics.
Maldonado, Ricardo (1993). Dynamic construals in Spanish. Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica ed Applicata 22:31–66.Google Scholar
Maldonado, Ricardo (1999). A media voz: problemas conceptuales del clítico se. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Mendikoetxea, Amaya (1999). Construcciones con se: medias, pasivas e impersonales. In Violeta DeMonte & Ignacio Bosque (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española 2, 1631–1722. Madrid: Espasa Calpa.
Molina Redondo, José Andrés de (1974). Usos de se: Cuestiones sintácticas y léxicas. Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería.
Moliner, M. (1966). Diccionario de uso del español. Madrid: Gredos.
Moraña, Mabel (1996). Introducción. In Mabel Moraña, (ed.), Mujer y cultura en la colonia hispanoamericana, 7–22. Pittsburgh: Biblioteca de América, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, University of Pittsburgh.
Olivera Campirán, Maricela (1992). Algunas consideraciones en torno a la condición social de la mujer y su capacitación técnica en el estado de México. In Patricia Galeana (ed.), La condición de la mujer mexicana, Tomo I, 269–78. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Gobierno del Estado de Puebla.
Pacheco Ladrón de Guevara, Lourdes (1993). Las mujeres: Nuevos actores políticos. In Patricia Galeana (ed.), La condición de la mujer mexicana, Tomo II, 19–32. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Gobierno del Estado de Puebla.
Pereira Scherre, Maria Marta (2001). Phrase-level parallelism effect on noun-phrase number agreement. Language Variation and Change 13:91–107.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana (1980). The notion of the plural in Puerto Rican Spanish: Competing constraints on /s/ deletion. In William Labov (ed.), Locating language in time and space, 55–67. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Poplack, Shana, & Tagliamonte, Sali (2001). African American English in the diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rand, David, & Sankoff, David (1990). GoldVarb: A variable rule application for Macintosh. Version 2. Montreal: Centre de recherches mathématiques, Université de Montréal.
Real Academia Española (1780). RAE usual 1780. Madrid: Joachín Ibarra. Facsimile reprint of the edition of La Biblioteca de la Real Academia Española. 〈http://buscon.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle〉 Accessed 12 April 2002.
Real Academia Española (1791). RAE usual 1791. 3rd ed. Madrid: Viuda de Joaquín Ibarra. Facsimile reprint of the edition of La Biblioteca de la Real Academia Española. 〈http://buscon.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle〉 Accessed 12 April 2002.
Real Academia Española (1978). Esbozo de una nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Real Academia Española (2001). Diccionario de la lengua Española. Vigésima segunda edición. 〈http://www.rae.es/〉 Accessed 12 April 2002. (Referred to as DRAE).
Santamaría, Francisco Javier (1959). Diccionario de mejicanismos, razonado; comprobado con citas de autoridades, comparado con el de americanismos y con los vocabularios provinciales de los más distinguidos diccionaristas hispanoamericanos. México: Porrua.
Schlau, Stacey (1996). ‘Yo no tengo necesidad que me lleven a la Inquisición’: Las ilusas María Rita Vargas y María Lucía Celis. In Mabel Moraña, (ed.), Mujer y cultura en la colonia hispanoamericana, 183–93. Pittsburgh: Biblioteca de América, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, University of Pittsburgh.
Schmitz, J. R. (1966). The se me construction: Reflexive for unplanned occurrences. Hispania 49:430–33.Google Scholar
Seed, Patricia (1988). To love, honor, and obey in colonial Mexico: Conflicts over marriage choice, 1574–1821. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen (1994). Language contact and change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Talmy, Leonard (1985). Force dynamics in language and thought. In William H. Eiltort et al. (eds.), Papers from the Regional Meetings, Chicago Linguistic Society 21.2, 293–337. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Tannen, Deborah (1998). Talk in the intimate relationship: His and hers. In Coates 1998, 435. Oxford: Blackwell.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena (2002). Le: From pronoun to verbal intensifier. Linguistics 40:285–18. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar