Volume 16, Issue 2

Resumen Desde un enfoque basado en el uso y en los estudios sobre gramaticalización, este trabajo pretende estudiar sincrónicamente la variación entre los verbos modales ter que , haber (de/que) y deber (de) en gallego. Analizaremos cuantitativamente un corpus de más de trescientos enunciados reales de carácter oral extraídos del CORILGA (Corpus Oral Informatizado da Lingua Galega) e interpretaremos los resultados de acuerdo con aquellos factores significativos en la selección – registro, voz, polaridad y valor semántico. Ya que no existen análisis variacionistas y cuantitativos de esta cuestión en gallego, esta aproximación pretende abrir el campo de investigación en dicha dirección. En definitiva, postulamos cuál es su distribución aproximada en términos modales y qué cambios podrían estar en marcha, en comparación con otras variedades lingüísticas y a la luz de aproximaciones previas a este tema. La contribución más relevante se halla en la ampliación de usos de ter que a territorios epistémicos (0a) y en la especialización de haber (de) (0b) como forma epistémica fuerte con poca evidencialidad. (0a) “pois ten que estar deprimidísima, supoño” (0b) “si, imos, imos andamos mirando a ver como está. Eu penso que ha de estar media, media libre pero …”

Contact linguists have proposed that core borrowing can indicate language attrition – as the loan replaces its native-origin counterpart – while cultural borrowing expands the lexicon (Campbell, Lyle. 2013. Historical linguistics: An introduction , 3rd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Muysken, Pieter. 2000. Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). However, Tadmor and Haspelmath (Tadmor, Uri & Martin Haspelmath. 2009. Loanwords in the world’s languages: A comparative handbook . Berlin: De Gruyter) found that in core borrowing cases, coexistence of the foreign and the native forms is more common than replacement. In this paper, I explore coexistence and replacement scenarios of Spanish-origin core loan verbs and their native-origin counterparts in Paraguayan Guaraní. These loans have been previously described as instances of code-switching (Estigarribia, Bruno. 2017. Insertion and backflagging as mixing strategies underlying Guaraní-Spanish mixed words. In Bruno Estigarribia & Justin Pinta (eds.), Guaraní linguistics in the 21st century , 315–347. Leiden: Brill; Kallfell, Guido. 2016. ¿Cómo hablan los paraguayos con dos lenguas?: gramática del jopara . Asunción: CEADUC). Tokens of highly frequent native-origin verbs along with their broadly equivalent Spanish-origin loans were extracted from 40 interviews and were correlated with the senses of each verb. Results show that some Spanish verb loans replace its native-origin counterpart to convey only one of its senses, while the native-origin form remains the preferred form to convey the other senses. This specialized use also suggests that these semantically specialized Spanish verb loans are not code-switches but rather integrated lexical items in Guaraní.

Some previous sociolinguistic work in Chilean Spanish has claimed that velar palatalization (i.e., production of a word like gente /xente/ ‘people’ as [çen̪.t̪e] or [x j en̪.t̪e]) is a categorical feature of all speakers of this dialect, while other scholars have argued that palatalization of /x/ is conditioned by sociolinguistic factors. The present study comprises a sociophonetic analysis of the production of /x/ across 61 speakers from Santiago, Chile in an effort to acoustically verify one of these two claims. Via the use of static and dynamic analyses of 2,107 tokens of /x/ in diverse phonological environments, this paper demonstrates that among these data, only linguistic factors condition the place of articulation and degree of constriction of /x/. Overall, /x/ palatalization before /e/ appears to be a gradient strengthening phenomenon generalized among the entire sample of Santiago Spanish speakers. Further, I argue that the dynamic analyses are superior both theoretically and methodologically as they allow for more faithful capturing of the variability inherent in the speech signal.

This paper aims to study two types of distinct vocatives in absolute position in Portuguese of Libolo (Angola), a barely studied African variety of Portuguese: the initial call and the insistent call. The results reveal that: (i) long postonic syllables characterize the two types of calls; (ii) there is greater variability in the duration of the postonic syllable of insistent calls; (iii) the duration is a robust correlate that distinguishes these two types of vocatives; and (iv) insistent calls are longer, both concerning the total duration of the utterance and in relation to the duration of each syllable (that is, there is an additive effect). These results are supported by statistical analyses. It was proved that the difference in duration between initial and insistent calls in Libolo Portuguese is statistically significant. Furthermore, Bayesian analyses not only conferred greater reliability on the results of the initial analyses, since it is a small dataset, but also provided a greater understanding of the relationship between the two types of vocatives, regarding the greater variability of results of the insistent call.

Most sociolinguistic work on variation focuses on how rates of occurrence or mean measurements differ between speech communities and speakers. However, speakers and communities also differ in variability  – that is, in dispersion around the mean. The current study investigates the effects of speech style and multilingualism on variation and variability, by measuring the degree of intervocalic /bdɡ/ spirantization in spontaneous and careful speech. Data come from two varieties of Uruguayan Spanish, one monolingual (Montevideo) and one in contact with Brazilian Portuguese (Rivera). The results from a variation analysis confirm expected linguistic and social effects on gradient spirantization. An analysis of variability shows that, at the group level, careful speech is more variable than spontaneous speech, and the data from Rivera is more variable than that from Montevideo. Variability at the individual level differs slightly, suggesting that the group-level variability arises from between-speaker variability and within-speaker variability in different contexts. I propose that multilingualism in Rivera may heighten variability because contact with Portuguese provides a wider range of available pronunciations, and that careful speech may increase variability because the available pronunciations are subject to conflicting standards that are most active in this style.

This investigation explores the perception and use of dar ‘give’  +  gerund, i.e.,  dame pasando ‘pass me’, as a request in Ecuadorian Andean Spanish. Previous research has focused on origins and uses of dar +  gerund, often classifying it as an attenuated request form that arose, in part, from sustained contact with Ecuadorian Kichwa. This paper demonstrates that a simple definition of politeness insufficiently captures the requester’s complex calculation of social relationship, perceived imposition, indirectness and politeness when making a request with dar +  gerund. Furthermore, dar +  gerund tends to be perceived as most appropriate in equal social/functional relationships, breaking with previous research that positions more attenuated requests with deference and formality. By examining the perception of appropriate use through an online questionnaire, observations and sociolinguistic interviews, this investigation shows how this dialectal construction encodes a range of social meaning in a particular context.

This study tests if New Mexican Spanish speakers’ productions of words that variably display paragogic /e/ ( rincón ∼ rincon e ‘corner’) are predictable from their lexical frequency, utterance position, and the frequency with which these words occur in an utterance position that conditions paragoge. In the study, the variable that measures the frequency with which words occur in the conditioning context is referred to as the FCC . The analysis of 77 word types and 2,235 tokens produced by 24 speakers demonstrates that the likelihood that a speaker produces paragogic /e/ increases when words are produced at the end of an utterance. The study also finds novel evidence for the mediating effect of lexical frequency on the effect of the FCC variable: the influence of the frequency with which words are produced in utterance-final position on the likelihood of paragogic /e/ is strengthened as lexical frequency decreases . Together with research on reductive phonological processes (e.g., Forrest, John. 2017. The dynamic interaction between lexical and contextual frequency: A case study of (ING). Language Variation and Change 29(2). 129–156), it seems that the effect of the FCC variable is amplified by lexical frequencies that already harbor the phonological process. These novel findings invite scholars to reconsider the assumption that such effects require many exemplars to shape lexical representation and speech production.

In a survey, 1,053 Brazilians provided the diminutive form of 60 test words. For example, given desconto participants provided diminutives such as descontinho or descontito. Most responses involved the suffixes - zinho and -inho. However, in many cases - zito and -ito were given as well . Statistical analysis revealed that the final phone and stress pattern of the base word were the most important predictors of diminutive form. A number of age-apparent changes were observed suggesting that certain diminutive forms may be on their way out in words with a particular phonological shape or in certain states. The state of residence, often in interaction with another predictor, proved to be an influencing factor as well. However, similar diminutivization patterns did not hold between geographically contiguous states, but between states with similarly sized populations suggesting an urban versus rural divide in Brazil.