Document Types
Individual Presentation
Location
UTSA Downtown-Riverwalk
Start Date
2-23-2024 11:05 AM
End Date
2-23-2024 11:25 AM
Abstract
Following Reynoso’s (2001, 2005) framework where culture plays a crucial role in the analysis of diminutive morphology, the present study analyzes the socio-pragmatic functions of the Spanish diminutive in the speech of two U.S.-Mexico border regions differing by degree of bilingualism. The first dataset consists of 49 sociolinguistic interviews from a Spanish–English bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S. where Spanish is the heritage language, provided in the CESA Corpus (Carvalho, 2012). The second dataset consists of 18 sociolinguistic interviews of predominantly monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, provided in the PRESEEA Corpus (https://preseea.uah.es/). All bilingual informants completed a bilingual questionnaire (Birdsong, Gertken, & Amegual, 2012). Language background information for the bilingual informants is reported in Table 1.
The analysis revealed a total of 1,052 tokens of Spanish diminutives in the CESA Corpus and 407 diminutive tokens in the Mexicali corpus. While the diminutive suffixes -illo/a and -ín were used in the Mexicali corpus in addition to -ito/a, only the suffix -ito/a was observed for heritage speakers. All tokens were classified into their word category as reported in Table 2 for both corpora. Importantly, only diminutive forms that exhibit a pragmatic force in the speech of our informants were included in the final analysis, which resulted in 758 tokens for the CESA corpus and 297 for the Mexicali corpus. Similar to the Mexicali corpus, the Spanish diminutive in heritage Spanish manifests an array of culturally-determined pragmatic values that require a high degree of subjectivity (see Table 3) For heritage speakers, a subjective evaluation is more prevalent when talking about childhood experiences and expressing affection toward grandparents. By examining the pragmatic domain, this study contributes to our understanding of language use in Spanish–English bilinguals from Southern Arizona (Fernández Flórez, 2022; Kern, 2017), and U.S. Spanish in general.
Recommended Citation
Cruz, Abel, "Expressing diminutive meaning in heritage Spanish: The role of culturally appropriate community norms" (2024). 11th National Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language. 14.
https://digitalcommons.tamusa.edu/heritage_spanish/SCHEDULE/Friday/14
Included in
Latin American Languages and Societies Commons, Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons
Expressing diminutive meaning in heritage Spanish: The role of culturally appropriate community norms
UTSA Downtown-Riverwalk
Following Reynoso’s (2001, 2005) framework where culture plays a crucial role in the analysis of diminutive morphology, the present study analyzes the socio-pragmatic functions of the Spanish diminutive in the speech of two U.S.-Mexico border regions differing by degree of bilingualism. The first dataset consists of 49 sociolinguistic interviews from a Spanish–English bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S. where Spanish is the heritage language, provided in the CESA Corpus (Carvalho, 2012). The second dataset consists of 18 sociolinguistic interviews of predominantly monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, provided in the PRESEEA Corpus (https://preseea.uah.es/). All bilingual informants completed a bilingual questionnaire (Birdsong, Gertken, & Amegual, 2012). Language background information for the bilingual informants is reported in Table 1.
The analysis revealed a total of 1,052 tokens of Spanish diminutives in the CESA Corpus and 407 diminutive tokens in the Mexicali corpus. While the diminutive suffixes -illo/a and -ín were used in the Mexicali corpus in addition to -ito/a, only the suffix -ito/a was observed for heritage speakers. All tokens were classified into their word category as reported in Table 2 for both corpora. Importantly, only diminutive forms that exhibit a pragmatic force in the speech of our informants were included in the final analysis, which resulted in 758 tokens for the CESA corpus and 297 for the Mexicali corpus. Similar to the Mexicali corpus, the Spanish diminutive in heritage Spanish manifests an array of culturally-determined pragmatic values that require a high degree of subjectivity (see Table 3) For heritage speakers, a subjective evaluation is more prevalent when talking about childhood experiences and expressing affection toward grandparents. By examining the pragmatic domain, this study contributes to our understanding of language use in Spanish–English bilinguals from Southern Arizona (Fernández Flórez, 2022; Kern, 2017), and U.S. Spanish in general.
