Document Types
Individual Presentation
Start Date
2-24-2024 12:00 PM
End Date
2-24-2024 12:20 PM
Track
Applied Linguistics
Abstract
Previous research on relative clause (RC) accessibility, the mental resources required to process and produce RCs (Lau & Tanaka 2021), is widely documented across many varieties of Spanish (Lope Blanch, 1988; Silva-Corvalán, 1999; Bentivoglio, 2003; Betancourt et al., 2009; Ezeizabarrena, 2012; del Río et al., 2012; Cerrón-Palomino, 2018; Checa-García, 2019; Lau & Tanaka 2021). In the case of heritage Spanish, eye-processing research shows that subject RCs (SRCs) are more accessible than (direct) object RCs (ORCs) (Madsen 2018). Although there are no production studies that attempt to examine whether this accessibility hierarchy holds for production, the use of resumptive pronouns offers an insight into potential difficulties in RC accessibility (McCloskey, 2006). In this pilot study, I analyze the usage resumptive pronouns in corpus data, to examine whether the occurrence of resumption mirrors processing difficulties in RC comprehension. A total of 409 tokens were extracted from 29 speakers, 8 from the Corpus del Español en el Sur de Arizona [Corpus of Spanish in Southern Arizona] (CESA) (Carvalho, 2012) and 21 from Bangor-Miami Corpus (Bangor-Miami) (Deuchar et al., 2014). As an initial study, a wide range of linguistic and extralinguistic factors were considered based on their significance in previous research on Spanish, along with code-switching within and around the RC. Results from a multivariate regression with mixed effects showed that subject expression, syntactic function, restrictivity, head noun phrase language, and clause language were factors that significantly condition the occurrence of resumption. The direction of the effect indicates that SRCs favor resumption more than ORCs, which is in direct opposition to results of RC comprehension (Madsen, 2018). Furthermore, the RCs showed that code-switching variables significantly condition the usage of resumptive elements, but that language ideologies around code-switching may potentially interfere with its usage. These results outline resumption in RCs as a topic for discussing syntactic variability in the heritage language classroom, especially in the face of negative ideologies surrounding code-switching.
Recommended Citation
Román, Miguel, "Resumption and Code-switching in the Relative Clauses from Heritage Speakers of Spanish: A Variationist Approach" (2024). 11th National Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language. 21.
https://digitalcommons.tamusa.edu/heritage_spanish/SCHEDULE/Saturday/21
Included in
Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons, Syntax Commons
Resumption and Code-switching in the Relative Clauses from Heritage Speakers of Spanish: A Variationist Approach
Previous research on relative clause (RC) accessibility, the mental resources required to process and produce RCs (Lau & Tanaka 2021), is widely documented across many varieties of Spanish (Lope Blanch, 1988; Silva-Corvalán, 1999; Bentivoglio, 2003; Betancourt et al., 2009; Ezeizabarrena, 2012; del Río et al., 2012; Cerrón-Palomino, 2018; Checa-García, 2019; Lau & Tanaka 2021). In the case of heritage Spanish, eye-processing research shows that subject RCs (SRCs) are more accessible than (direct) object RCs (ORCs) (Madsen 2018). Although there are no production studies that attempt to examine whether this accessibility hierarchy holds for production, the use of resumptive pronouns offers an insight into potential difficulties in RC accessibility (McCloskey, 2006). In this pilot study, I analyze the usage resumptive pronouns in corpus data, to examine whether the occurrence of resumption mirrors processing difficulties in RC comprehension. A total of 409 tokens were extracted from 29 speakers, 8 from the Corpus del Español en el Sur de Arizona [Corpus of Spanish in Southern Arizona] (CESA) (Carvalho, 2012) and 21 from Bangor-Miami Corpus (Bangor-Miami) (Deuchar et al., 2014). As an initial study, a wide range of linguistic and extralinguistic factors were considered based on their significance in previous research on Spanish, along with code-switching within and around the RC. Results from a multivariate regression with mixed effects showed that subject expression, syntactic function, restrictivity, head noun phrase language, and clause language were factors that significantly condition the occurrence of resumption. The direction of the effect indicates that SRCs favor resumption more than ORCs, which is in direct opposition to results of RC comprehension (Madsen, 2018). Furthermore, the RCs showed that code-switching variables significantly condition the usage of resumptive elements, but that language ideologies around code-switching may potentially interfere with its usage. These results outline resumption in RCs as a topic for discussing syntactic variability in the heritage language classroom, especially in the face of negative ideologies surrounding code-switching.
Comments
relative clause, code-switching, language ideologies, accessibility, syntax