A Minimalist approach to gender agreement in the Afro-Bolivian DP: Variation and the specification of uninterpretable features

Sandro Sessarego; Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach

doi:10.1515/flin.2011.017

Article

A Minimalist approach to gender agreement in the Afro-Bolivian DP: Variation and the specification of uninterpretable features

Sandro Sessarego and Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach

Published/Copyright: October 19, 2011

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From the journal Volume 45 Issue 2

This article analyzes gender-agreement variation in the Determiner Phrase (DP) of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS). We claim that this is an instance of crossgenerational change, consisting in the systematic substitution of stigmatized basilectal Afro-Bolivian features with more prestigious Bolivian Spanish ones. In light of recent minimalist models, the variability encountered in the corpus can be accounted for systematically as a by-product of the differential specification of uninterpretable features in a derivation. This study highlights an on-going process of post-bozal Spanish approximation to a more prestigious Spanish variety. Such transition seems to be driven by social factors and is significantly regulated by syntactic constraints.

Keywords:: Afro-Bolivian Spanish; gender agreement; determiner phrase; variation; feature specification; minimalism

Published Online: 2011-10-19

Published in Print: 2011-October

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.017

Keywords for this article

Afro-Bolivian Spanish; gender agreement; determiner phrase; variation; feature specification; minimalism