Volume 2010, Issue 203

As the second most widely spoken language in the City after English, Spanish in New York has long been the object of scholarly attention. Recent publications have reported on work based on data from the Otheguy-Zentella corpus, one of the largest corpora of spoken Spanish ever gathered in the United States. The corpus provides the common thread for research in this issue, which addresses problems having to do with phonology, lexicon, and grammar in Spanish in New York. Some of the papers address issues of language contact, others look at Spanish in the City without reference to the influence of English. The data from the corpus consists of naturalistic speech samples obtained from both first- and second-generation speakers from a variety of Latin American origins. The papers deal with the relationship between loanwords and collocations, the role of efficiency in determining which patrimonial words are retained and which replaced by loanwords, the nature of suprasegmental variation in phonology, and the variable use of subject personal pronouns.

Analyses of the variable weakening of coda /s/ in Spanish have largely relied on a categorical conception of variability. While categorical descriptions have proven to be useful heuristics, they have nevertheless tended to obscure important facts about phonological variation and the factors that probabilistically condition it. A growing body of research on sociophonetic variation offers evidence that correlations between linguistic forms and social factors can be manifested in fine-grained subsegmental aspects of speech. The current study conducts a subsegmental analysis of coda /s/ in the speech of five Dominican women. Instrumental analysis of 625 tokens: (1) demonstrates that a strictly segmental description groups together tokens that are significantly different from one another acoustically; (2) offers an instrumentally-based, alternative description of coda /s/ tokens in terms of two continuous, acoustic measures, duration and center of gravity; and (3) argues that a subsegmental approach is better at describing the variation present in speech, and also better exploiting the explanatory power of several linguistic factors known to condition the phenomenon. As a result, the present analysis offers a more accurate picture of the Spanish of Dominicans in New York, and provides a model for greater descriptive and explanatory adequacy in the study of Spanish in general.

Resumen Este artículo trata sobre la transferencia léxica en el español hablado en la ciudad de Nueva York. En este estudio, siguiendo la tipología propuesta por Otheguy y García (Diffusion of lexical innovations in the Spanish of Cuban Americans, Pan American University, 1988), se analizan calcos fraseológicos del tipo llamar para atrás, máquina de contestar o último nombre. Según Otheguy y García (Diffusion of lexical innovations in the Spanish of Cuban Americans, Pan American University, 1988) y Otheguy (A reconsideration of the notion of loan translation in the analysis of U.S. Spanish, Mouton de Gruyter, 1993, When contact speakers talk, linguistic theory listens, Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), calcos como el anterior llamar para atrás o máquina de contestar deberían ser considerados como innovaciones comunicativas en vez de novedades estructurales. Es decir, constituyen usos nuevos pero no alteran el sistema lingüístico per se. Sin embargo, en este trabajo se argumenta que expresiones como las anteriores representan cambios sistemáticos en la lengua ya que suponen nuevas colocaciones — combinaciones de palabras que se distinguen por su alta frecuencia de uso — almacenadas en el léxico mental del hablante bilingüe. De este modo, se propone una revisión del análisis de este tipo de expresiones, considerando también otras clases de innovaciones de carácter semántico. Para esta investigación se muestra el análisis de un corpus de treinta entrevistas con informantes de los principales dialectos hispanos hablados en Nueva York.

One manifestation of a general drive for efficiency in communication is the tendency to shorten high-frequency words and phrases. In situations of language contact, the drive for efficient communication is intensified. The demonstration of efficiency hinges on the simple observation that not all the words of a receiving language are displaced, and on the detailed observation of which words are retained and which are replaced by loanwords. Many loanwords fill a conceptual gap, but many do not; this study focuses on the latter. It is proposed that these loanwords instantiate efficiency in language behavior, as the borrowing process replaces comparatively longer words with comparatively shorter ones. On average, the length difference between displaced native words and borrowed loanwords is much higher than that between retained native words and potential loanwords that were not borrowed. To investigate this process of selective borrowing driven by efficiency, English lexical insertions were extracted from the spoken Spanish of bilingual Latinos in New York and compared with two control corpora. These results indicate that the lexical borrowing process targets pairs of words that result in especially large savings in word-length and spares those where borrowing would produce little or no savings, demonstrating that efficiency is a significant factor in explaining borrowing behavior.

In their sociolinguistic analyses of the variable use of Spanish subject personal pronouns, researchers have noted that pronominal expression is conditioned by several linguistic and social variables such as a change in subject referent, the semantic class and person and number of the verb, formality of speech and speaker age. Recent studies have also reported that pronominal expression is also influenced by a speaker's exposure to English and contact with other Spanish varieties that exhibit elevated uses of overt pronominals. Based on Grimshaw's (Conflict talk, Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Labov and Fanshel's (Therapeutic discourse: Psychotherapy as conversation, Academic Press, 1977) tenets regarding conflict talk, in which they note that conflict involves speech acts such as defenses, retreats and challenges, and on Brenneis (Telling troubles, Oxford University Press, 1996), who maintains that the contents of conflict narratives are intertwined with the “narrator, audience, purposes and expectations”, this study hypothesizes that the presence of conflict in narratives mediates subject pronoun expression. It is posited here that because conflict contains such features, its presence will affect singular and plural subject pronoun forms, and it will strongly compete with the effect that another strong variable (a change in subject referent) has on pronominal expression. It is also posited that the robust effect that conflict exerts on pronominals will be attested in all speakers regardless of age.

The subject pronouns of English (which are nearly categorical) have contributed to a cross-generational increase in occurrence rates of Spanish pronouns (which are variably overt or null) among second generation speakers in New York. But is the passage of time also associated with overt pronoun rate increases among first generation immigrants? Analysis of a large corpus of verbs (n = 51,478) revealed that first generation speakers who arrived in New York between the ages of four and 14 showed significantly higher rates of pronoun use than those who arrived as young adults or older. Among all three first generation age-of-arrival cohorts, the number of years spent in New York was associated with higher rates of pronoun use. A significant difference owing to region of origin among first generation cohorts was also evident: Caribbean speakers showed higher pronoun rates than Mainland speakers, with the difference between regional rates higher among early arrivers than later arrivers. Multivariate analysis employed a two-level hierarchical linear model which revealed that all three predictors (age of arrival, exposure to New York, and region of origin) made independent, statistically significant contributions to pronoun overtness. The regression also showed that region of origin is the strongest predictor of pronoun use, after taking into account exposure and arrival age.

This sociolinguistic analysis of Spanish overt subject pronouns examines their placement either before or after verbs in a corpus of interviews with Spanish-speaking New Yorkers. The variable placement of subject pronouns responds to a number of linguistic and speaker variables which have not been defined for any dialect of Spanish. In New York, this variability seems to be additionally influenced by English and by the contact of different dialects of Spanish. By analyzing the role that the speakers' socio-demographic characteristics plays on pronoun placement, I observe, for pronoun placement, the same processes of language and dialect contact documented in previous research with regard to the presence and absence of the pronoun, and I interpret them as supporting the hypotheses that language contact and dialect leveling are active forces shaping Spanish in New York. I further note that generative parametric theory can suggest an account of the concomitant changes observed in rates of preposing and overtness in Spanish in New York. My analysis also shows that, in the face of important contact and leveling changes taking place in the City, the speaker's region of origin continues to be the prevailing factor giving form to pronominal usage in Spanish in New York.

The sociolinguistic situation of Hueyapan, Morelos, is similar to those described in other studies of modern Nahua communities: the language is in a rapid process of decline. This article describes the situation within one particular subcommunity of the town: the congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses. Here the Nahuatl language has experienced a revival within the last five years, to a degree where congregational meetings are now held mostly in Nahuatl, and where young Witnesses are probably the only group of youths in Hueyapan to communicate daily in Nahuatl. It is argued that this situation arose as a result of the combination of the general sociolinguistic background in Hueyapan and the specific value system and social dynamics that exist in the community of Jehovah's Witnesses.