Much recent scholarship has sought to identify the linguistic and social factors that favor the expression or omission of subject pronouns in Spanish. This volume brings together leading experts on ...the topic of language variation in Spanish to provide a panoramic view of research trends, develop probabilistic models of grammar, and investigate the impact of language contact on pronoun expression.The book consists of three sections. The first studies the distributional patterns and conditioning forces on subject pronoun expression in four monolingual varieties-Dominican, Colombian, Mexican, and Peninsular-and makes cross-dialectal comparisons. In the second section, experts explore Spanish in contact with English, Maya, Catalan, and Portuguese to determine the extent to which each language influences this syntactic variable. The final section examines the acquisition of variable subject pronoun expression among monolingual and bilingual children as well as adult second language learners.
The series Studies in Language Change presents empirically based research that extends knowledge about historical relations among the world's languages without restriction to any particular language ...family or region. While not devoted explicitly to theoretical explanations, the series hopes to contribute to the advancement in understandings of language change as well as adding to the store of well-analysed historical-comparative data on the world's languages.
This volume brings together studies that combine both traditional and contemporary tools in the study of syntactic geolectal variation, with a special focus on a subset of Iberian varieties.
This book covers the analysis of Spanish written from the early 16th to the early 19th century, immediately before the Independent period in most Spanish-speaking colonies. It is based on manuscripts ...such as the Segunda Carta de Relacion (1522) by Hernán Cortès, a rare inquisitorial manuscript known as El Abecedario, old printed books, and published collections of linguistic documents.
This pathbreaking synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives an unprecedented view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on an ...extraordinary range and depth of sources, William F. Hanks documents for the first time the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language of indigenous literature, and how it ultimately became the language of rebellion against the system that produced it.Converting Wordsincludes original analyses of the linguistic practices of both missionaries and Mayas-as found in bilingual dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, land documents, native chronicles, petitions, and the forbidden Maya Books ofChilam Balam.Lucidly written and vividly detailed, this important work presents a new approach to the study of religious and cultural conversion that will illuminate the history of Latin America and beyond, and will be essential reading across disciplinary boundaries.
This monograph examines the first syntactic unit in child language by presenting a longitudinal multiple-case study that focuses on the inner structure of nominal expressions in bilingual or ...monolingual child Spanish. This compilation of case studies offers the first insight on some of the properties of nominal expressions in bilingual or monolingual child Spanish and test some of the current theoretical proposals to analyze the main syntactic properties and operations within the nominal phrase. The findings of the study suggest new directions to address some core questions about monolingual and bilingual language acquisition taking as a point of departure the notion of economy, prevalent in the most recent theoretical discussion. Given the combination of empirical and theoretical discussions, this monograph will be appealing to a broad range of researchers in syntax and language acquisition.
Syntactic movement is a pervasive phenomenon in natural language and, as such, has played a key role in syntactic theorizing. Nonetheless, an understanding of the mechanism that allows a constituent ...to appear to the right of its base-generated position has remained elusive. This groundbreaking research monograph aims to address this gap in our knowledge by expanding the inventory of languages and data sets traditionally considered in the literature. Specifically, Ortega-Santos analyzes the interplay between focus, word order and ellipsis in Spanish. A major finding that emerges from the analysis is that the tension between linearization requirements and rightward movement is diminished by ellipsis. Current debates on the syntax of the VOS order and preverbal subjects in Null-Subject Languages also figure prominently in the discussion, as novel empirical evidence for the existence of null expletives is provided: a non-trivial issue for our understanding of the Extended Projection Principle and subjecthood across languages.
Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take ...place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.
