Beyond Semantic Groupings: The Verb as a Predictor of Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish

This study explores the effects of verb-related predictors of variable subject pronoun expression (SPE) using 9,671 tokens from three speech communities: (a) Barranquilla, Colombia, (b) New York City Colombians, and (c)... [ view full abstract ]

This study explores the effects of verb-related predictors of variable subject pronoun expression (SPE) using 9,671 tokens from three speech communities: (a) Barranquilla, Colombia, (b) New York City Colombians, and (c) Xalapa, Mexico. Verbal tense-mood-aspect and verb semantics have been found to be robust SPE predictors (Carvalho, Orozco & Shin 2015; Enríquez 1984; Hurtado 2005; Otheguy & Zentella 2012; Silva-Corvalán & Enrique-Arias 2017; among others). Interestingly, verb semantics has been explored using several different predictor/factor configurations. The results for Lexical Content and Verb Type largely concur with those of previous studies, confirming that verb semantics significantly conditions SPE. Nevertheless, these results fail to augment our collective knowledge. Thus, I analyze the lexical effect of the verb—recently proposed as an alternative to verb semantics (Orozco 2018)—by testing verbs as random effects factors. Results uncover opposite tendencies between verbs in the same semantic category in all three communities. For example, in Barranquilla recordar ‘remember’ favors overt subjects but acordarse ‘remember’ has the opposite effect. Likewise, in Xalapa ser ‘be’, favors overt subjects but estar ‘be’ favors null subjects. These results provide a more detailed account of how verbs condition SPE. They show that grouping verbs according to their semantic commonalities in exploring how they condition SPE leaves important differences uncovered. Furthermore, a comparison across the three corpora reveals that the effects of the verb lack the cross-dialectal consistency exhibited by all other internal SPE predictors (cf. Carvalho, Orozco & Shin 2015:xv). For instance, estar ‘be’ favors overt subjects in Barranquilla, has a neutral effect in New York, and favors null subjects in Xalapa. Concurrently, ver ‘see’ promotes overt subjects in Barranquilla and NYC but has the opposite effect in Xalapa. Therefore, these findings set the verb apart from all other linguistic SPE predictors. They suggest that the apparent differences in how the verb conditions SPE in our three corpora may be caused by the effects of lexical idiosyncrasy. This analysis expands our analytical scope, as it improves the accountability of our findings on SPE (and perhaps other linguistic variables) and contributes to opening exciting research paths.