The issue of subject pronominal expression (SPE) in language contact situations, as
illustrated in Nosotros somos muy buenos estudiantes [‘We are very good students’] vs. Ø
somos muy buenos estudiantes [‘(we) are very good students’], has been the focus of
decades of research in both variationist and generative studies (Bentivoglio, 1987;
Cameron, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996; Chomsky, 1981, 1986; Huang, 1984; Orozco & Guy,
2008; Travis, 2005a, 2005b; Otheguy & Zentella, 2007, 2012; Rizzi, 1982; Morales,
1980; Silva-Corvalán, 1982, 1994, 1997; inter alios). While generative studies have
shown that null subject languages (NSLs) can either be licensed by rich verbal paradigms
or by discursive mechanisms, variationist studies have shown that there are predictors
that condition SPE in NSLs. Furthermore, they have argued that the rates of SPE reflect
uniformity across different varieties of Spanish (Orozco, 2015).
In spite of this significant body of evidence in monolingual varieties of Spanish, studies
involving bilingual groups and indigenous languages are relatively sparse, as most studies
have studied Spanish in contact with other Indo-European languages. This dissertation
investigates the SPE in the Spanish of a group of highly proficient bilingual speakers of
Uwa and Spanish in a language contact situation. The research reported in this
dissertation also studies the nature of cross-linguistic influence between the two
languages of the bilinguals. Specifically, the idiosyncratic morphosyntactic traces in SPE
resulting from the contact between Uwa and Spanish and whether those traces evidence
patterns of variation, and, if so, how they can be accounted for.
Spanish and Uwa are both NSLs and thus both allow for referential null subject
pronouns (SPs). However, each language has specific syntactic and discursive predictors responsible for null subjects. For instance, Uwa relies heavily on discursive clues
whereas Spanish is a sentence-oriented language. This means that while in Uwa the
subject reference is understood from context and discursive clues governed by chains of
topics, the rich verbal paradigm of Spanish is responsible for licensing null subjects. The
fact that Spanish and Uwa are both NLs but still have dissimilar typological status
provides a rich testing ground for the mechanisms involved in SPE as well as for
investigating the effects of bilingualism.
This dissertation aims at enhancing our linguistic knowledge in relation to the
principles and mechanisms involved in SPE in bilingual communities and at providing a
better understanding of the nature of cross-linguistic influence in highly proficient
bilinguals.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/39512 |
| Date | 15 August 2019 |
| Creators | Moreno, Leonardo |
| Contributors | Munoz-Liceras, Juana |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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