Presenter Information

Miguel RománFollow

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.

Comments

relative clause, code-switching, language ideologies, accessibility, syntax

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Feb 24th, 12:00 PM Feb 24th, 12:20 PM

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.