Presentación de Laurel Abreu para la Tertulia, Octubre 30 del 2008, Dauer 240-A, 10:40-11:30am
I combine the areas of language variation, bilingualism and second language acquisition in my dissertation on the use of Spanish subject personal pronouns by monolingual Puerto Ricans, Puerto Rican heritage speakers who have grown up in the United States, and advanced second language learners of Spanish. Though this area of morphosyntax has been studied extensively in Spanish, no one study has brought together these three groups, nor have the various factors found to influence subject expression (such as switch-reference, priming, frequency of certain verbal constructions, etc.) been considered simultaneously. In other words, there has been no satisfactory explanation given thus far for why supposedly unnecessary or redundant subject pronouns are produced by native speakers. Furthermore, a general perception exists that second language learners produce an overabundance of subject pronouns, yet their spontaneous oral production has not been adequately compared to that of native speakers on the same task. In this study, I have utilized the sociolinguistic interview, a one-hour, informal conversation, to obtain data from thirty participants, ten in each of the groups mentioned above. 200 overt and null subject pronouns will then be extracted from each interview and coded for quantitative analysis. In addition to the importance of the role of switch-reference, I propose that priming plays a substantial part in the use of overt pronouns.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
