Volume 9, Issue 2 -

This paper presents a cross-linguistic analysis of the Old and American Spanish doubled possessive construction, in which the possessor is doubly marked in a nominal phrase by means of both a third person prenominal possessive pronoun and a prepositional possessive phrase ( su casa de Juan ‘lit. his house of John’). This construction is contrasted, in particular, with the French clitic possessive doubling construction ( son livre à lui ‘lit. his book to him’) and the Germanic possessor doubling construction ( dem Vater seine Katze ‘lit. the father his cat’), showing that the properties of the Spanish structure significantly differ from those of the French and Germanic patterns. A previous view of its typological status whereby the Spanish construction is related to the formal expression of inalienable possession in other languages is further critically discussed, and it is proposed instead that the prenominal possessive in the Spanish doubled possessive construction belongs to the class of evaluative possessives.

Resumen La voz grama en español es considerada en la actualidad un patrimonialismo derivado del latín gramina por medio de [min] > [mn] > [m]. No obstante, tanto esta etimología como esta evolución fonética son muy problemáticas por su naturaleza ad hoc en comparación con el resto de palabras castellanas cuyos étimos poseían [min] ( v. gr ., alambre , hombre , nombre ). En este artículo se investigarán estas cuestiones y se argumentará, primero, que grama procede, como otras variantes iberorrománicas ( v. gr ., gambre , gramia , grame ), de una forma similar al acusativo * graminem , y, segundo, que [min] > [m] es un desarrollo completamente ajeno al castellano. Estas conclusiones llevarán a proponer que grama es un occidentalismo. Asimismo, se discutirán las causas de la epéntesis de [b] en las secuencias [mbɾ].

This study centers on two Spanish language discourse markers: así in the Spanish-English contact area along the U.S.-Mexico border and vuelta , a discourse marker used in Andean Spanish which is in contact with Ecuadorian Quichua. Applying Relevance Theory, we observe how these markers convey emergent pragmatic and intersubjective functions. Vuelta is able to function as an enumerator indexing iterativity and as a quotative framing indirect speech. Intersubjectively, it frames discourse to be read as either proud, persistent, or annoying. Así is associated with particular interactional stances of solidarity and politeness. Frequently used by young women signaling prestige, femininity, and socio-economic status, así indexes values and cultural practices similar to middle-class lifestyles from the U.S. This study argues that in order to understand linguistic permeability and interference in both of these uses, we must first understand speakers’ communicative and social needs within their bilingual community.

In the Spanish of north-western Spain, word-final /-d/ shows a remarkable variety of phonetic outcomes. Its possible realizations include voiced approximants, voiceless fricatives and voiced and voiceless plosives, in addition to the deletion of the segment. Here we examine this complex pattern of allophony in a corpus of conversational speech, focusing on the effect of the following phonological context. The results show that most commonly /-d/ is either deleted or realized as a voiceless fricative. Voiceless fricatives are found in all phrasal contexts, but with significantly higher frequency before pause than before a vowel, which is consistent with the hypothesis of diachronic extension of the devoicing from the former context to the latter. The devoicing of /-d/ is neutralizing. Voiceless fricative realizations of /-d/ do not differ from those of phonemic /-θ/ either in amount of voicing or in duration. This implies that deletion and devoicing represent two alternative patterns of reduction starting from [ð], since phonemic /-θ/ is not subject to deletion. Whereas the deletion of /-d/ has lexical exceptions, its devoicing does not. Among the majority of /d/-final words, for which deletion is possible, the relative frequency with which they undergo deletion vs. devoicing appears to vary substantially depending on the specific lexical item. That is, both position in phrase and lexical identity probabilistically determine the realization of /-d/. In addition to contributing to our understanding of the synchronic and diachronic phonology of word-final obstruents in Spanish, we consider the extent to which these data, showing variable word-final devoicing, may help us understand the historical evolution of the crosslinguistically common phenomenon of systematic word-final devoicing.

Work on Spanish in the U.S. has increasingly examined the results of dialect contact. This paper analyzes realizations of syllable-final /s/ and word and syllable-initial /r̄/ in naturalistic interviews among 88 individuals in Chicago belonging to three generations of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and two generations of “MexiRicans.” It explores: (1) whether realizations change depending on the dialect of the interviewer – that is, whether accommodation is taking place; (2) if there is change across generations; (3) in the case of MexiRicans, whether individuals’ realizations align with the mother’s ethnolinguistic group. Results show that Mexicans’ phonological behavior did not vary for /s/ or /r̄/ according to interlocutor, while Puerto Ricans used velarized /r̄/ more frequently with other Puerto Ricans at a rate approaching significance. Significant differences were also found between generations in several cases but not for mother’s ethnolinguistic group; the interaction of generation and interlocutor showed significance in some cases. We also observed a correspondence between the use of a weakened /s/ and velarized /r̄/, although there was considerable variation among individual speakers.

This article provides a detailed description of the syntactic and semantic properties of the degree term bien in Spanish, which appears in expressions such as un jugador bien alto , and proposes a novel analysis that captures those properties. We propose that bien is a degree operator that is generated as a Deg head and binds the degree argument of a gradable adjective by means of an evaluative predicate we label GOOD. We define a “good degree” as one that evaluates a property with respect to a comparison class that exceeds a prototypical or expected standard. Un jugador bien alto is a player that is tall in a way that exceeds a prototypical or expected way of being tall for a player. It is argued that such an analysis not only accounts for the mixed set of properties that bien has, which overlap with certain degree modifiers, elatives and exclamatives, but does so in terms of a manner component (the predicate GOOD), which is part of the lexical meaning that bien has maintained in its evolution from manner adverb to degree term.