While the pseudo-cleft structure (1) is a standard and widely-employed focus form in Spanish, in some varieties (i.e. Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, Panamanian, Colombian, and Dominican), the Focalizing Ser construction (2) is used... [ view full abstract ]
While the pseudo-cleft structure (1) is a standard and widely-employed focus form in Spanish, in some varieties (i.e. Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, Panamanian, Colombian, and Dominican), the Focalizing Ser construction (2) is used as an alternative option.
The Focalizing Ser (FS) is a dialectally-marked structure and it has been extensively studied from various sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and syntactic perspectives (e.g. Sedano 1990; Curnow & Travis 2004; Pato 2010; Méndez Vallejo 2009). Despite the numerous efforts to understand the particularities of FS, it is still unclear whether FS shows any substantial dialectal differences, and what exactly motivates speakers from these varieties to choose it (over the standard form) in any given utterance.
To elucidate the dialectal puzzle, we discuss data collected from 371 participants living in five Colombian cities. The results of two acceptability judgment tests (128 sentences tested in both audio and written formats) indicate that although there is some dialectal variation between Caribbean and Andean varieties, the acceptability tendencies remain stable across the country. When comparing the results with those obtained from equivalent tests conducted in the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Venezuela, we find similar tendencies even across these macro-varieties.
Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of acceptability judgment tests and semi-production tests when studying phenomena such as FS, which is difficult to survey through regular sociolinguistic methods (e.g. interviews). We also highlight the importance of conducting a more comprehensive corpus study in which we investigate the frequency of use of FS and its correlation with sociolinguistic factors determining its use in FS varieties.
(1) Lo que quiero es pollo
‘It is chicken that I want’
(2) Quiero es pollo
‘It is chicken that I want’
References
CURNOW, T. AND C. TRAVIS. 2004. “The emphatic es construction of Colombian Spanish.” In: C. Moskovsky (ed.), Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, 1-11.
MÉNDEZ VALLEJO, D.C. 2009. The focalizing ser (‘to be’) in Colombian Spanish. PhD Dissertation. Indiana University.
PATO, E. 2010. “El verbo ser focalizador en el español de Colombia”. Español Actual: 93: 153-174.
SEDANO, M. 1990. Hendidas y otras construcciones con ser en el habla de Caracas. Caracas: UCV.
