28.4123, Review: Spanish; Morphology; Phonetics; Phonology; Semantics; Sociolinguistics; Syntax: Cuza,olson, Czerwionka (2016)

The LINGUIST List linguist at listserv.linguistlist.org
Mon Oct 9 16:43:01 UTC 2017


LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4123. Mon Oct 09 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4123, Review: Spanish; Morphology; Phonetics; Phonology; Semantics; Sociolinguistics; Syntax: Cuza,olson, Czerwionka (2016)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Clare Harshey <clare at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2017 12:42:51
From: John Ryan [buonanno2 at gmail.com, john.ryan at unco.edu]
Subject: Inquiries in Hispanic Linguistics

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36306199


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-5173.html

EDITOR: Alejandro  Cuza
EDITOR: Lori  Czerwionka
EDITOR: Daniel  Olson
TITLE: Inquiries in Hispanic Linguistics
SUBTITLE: From theory to empirical evidence
SERIES TITLE: Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 12
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: John M. Ryan, University of Northern Colorado

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

According to the book’s editors, the purpose of “Inquiries in Hispanic
Linguistics” (hereafter “Inquiries”) is to present eighteen peer-reviewed
articles, both theoretical and empirical, that are representative of: 1) the
quality of papers delivered at the 18th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium which
took place at Purdue University in November of 2014; and 2) the scope of
research currently conducted in the area of Hispanic linguistics. As an edited
compilation, the book’s introduction organizes its eighteen essays into three
broad areas of Hispanic linguistics, and in the following order: 1) syntax and
semantics, 2) phonetics/phonology and related interfaces; and 3) language
contact and variation. 

The first category of syntax and semantics includes seven papers, summarized
as follows:

The first paper of this section by José Camacho titled “Towards a theory of
assertion structure: Higher and lower focus in Colombian Spanish” demonstrates
that the difference between narrow and broad focus found in two structures of
Colombian Spanish can be adequately explained by syntactic analysis, the first
being a lower copular verb that can only merge below tense because of
c-command requirements, and a higher expletive which can only merge above
tense. The second paper by Grant Armstrong and titled “Towards a theory of
pronominal verb constructions in Spanish” argues for a common explanation for
the appearance of the clitic ‘se’ in all three unaccusative, unergative, and
transitive pronominal verb constructions, claiming that all three pronominal
verb types select a defective head which in Spanish produces [∅] and post
syntactically is filled by ‘se.’ Appearing third in this section of papers is
a psycholinguistic study by Joshua Frank titled “On the grammaticality of
recomplementation in Spanish,” offering a processing-based account as
contrasted with accepted grammatical-based accounts, to help explain the
difference in grammaticality judgments for this structure in English and
Spanish.

The section continues with a fourth paper by Laura Domínguez and Glyn Hicks,
titled “Synchronic change in a multidialectal Spanish community: Evidence from
null and postverbal subjects,” and provides what the authors assert is a
necessary minimalist account for the case of L1 morphosyntactic attrition
exhibited in the realization of null and postverbal subjects by speakers in
two bilingual Spanish-English communities, Cubans in Miami and Spaniards in an
unspecified location in the UK. The authors suggest that changes in these
structures are due to changes in lexical features within functional
categories. Using conversational data from Spanish and English, the fifth
paper in this section by Jonathan Steuck is titled “Exploring the
syntax-semantics-prosody interface: Complement clauses in conversation” and
investigates the relationship between a prosodic unit, namely, the IU
(intonation unit), and whether matrix and complement clauses occur within the
same or different IUs. Among the author’s conclusions are that both matrix and
complement clauses occur in the same IU more than two thirds of the time.
However, intervening syntactic material between the verb of the matrix clause
and the complement clause favors the occurrence of the complement clause in a
different IU. The sixth paper in this section by Ramón Padilla-Reyes, Javier
Gutiérrez-Rexach and Melvin González-Rivera and titled “Generalized
gradability and extremeness in Puerto Rican Spanish” seeks to provide a
unified semantic account of the expression of extremeness in Puerto Rican
Spanish among sentences, adverbs, adjectives and lexicalized phrases. The
authors do this by mapping extremeness along several contextually-dependent
dimensions. Bringing the first section of papers to a close is a study by
Elizabeth Gielau titled “On the mistaken identity of negated epistemics” which
examines the relationship between negated epistemic predicates to other types
of negated predicates or emotive predicates in Spanish. The author
demonstrates how all three predicate types share many of the same properties. 

The second general category of papers in the book has to do with phonetics and
phonology and their impact on a variety of other linguistic areas. The first
paper of this section by Laura Colantoni is titled “The ‘mestizo’ speech:
Participant selection and task choice in L2 speech.” Drawing upon acquisition
research on intonation, Colantoni shifts the focus of the book to methodology,
demonstrating the importance of including a variety of otherwise understudied
second language populations, particularly at the participant recruitment
stage. The author signals the particular impact that alphabetic writing in
Western societies has on reading and writing skills in L2 and bilingual
speech. The second paper of this section by Gabrielle Klassen and Matthew
Patience is titled “Stressed clitics in Argentine Spanish: Which way does the
clitic lean?” and revisits the question of stressed clitics against a previous
proposal by Colantoni and Cuervo (2013) that stressed clitics can either
function as affixes or independent words. Comparing duration, pitch and
intensity of verbs followed by stressed clitics to those followed by stressed
words and affixes, the authors find that clitics function more like stressed
affixes and conclude that clitics are becoming more word internal. The third
paper in this section on phonology titled “On the simplification of a prosodic
inventory: The Afro-Bolivian Spanish case” examines the prosodic inventory of
Afro Bolivian Spanish declarative sentences. Authors Sandro Sessarego and
Rajiv Rao demonstrate a reduced inventory of targets for pitch accents and
boundary tones in declarative sentences for this variety of Spanish as
compared to others, suggesting this phenomenon to be the result of what they
call a “conventionalized advanced second language acquisition process.” The
fourth paper of this section by Miguel García, titled “Segmental anchoring in
Peruvian Amazonian Spanish intonation,” explores intonation of Peruvian
Amazonian Spanish and conducts analyses of both segmental and suprasegmental
phenomena, concluding that tonal alignment is consistent within the stressed
vowel.

The fourth paper in this section by Brendan Regan, titled “The
prosody-pragmatics interface in the pragmaticalization of ‘!Hombre!’ as a
discourse marker” combines both qualitative discourse analysis and a
quantitative phonetic analysis of the use of “hombre” in Andalusian Spanish as
a discourse marker. The author demonstrates that different prosodic cues are
what determine the different pragmatic uses of “hombre” in this variety of
Spanish. The last chapter in this section by Gibran Delgado-Díaz and Iraida
Galarza, titled “Sociolinguistic implications on perception: The case of the
posterior /r/ in Puerto Rican Spanish,” evaluates the perception of posterior
/r/ in Puerto Rican Spanish. The authors find that the variables that impact
perception of /r/ and /h/ are age and sex of the speaker, as well as
phonological context.

The third and final section of the book consists of five chapters on the topic
of Spanish language contact and variation. The first of these papers by
Terrell A. Morgan and Scott A. Schwenter, titled “Vosotros, ustedes, and the
myth of the symmetrical Castilian pronoun system,” starts the section off with
an examination of the subject pronominal system in Castilian Spanish,
ultimately showing the asymmetry of this system, particularly in the plural
form of address, asserting that ‘vosotros’ is the only productive second
person form for many Castilian Spanish speakers, despite the degree of
formality. The second paper of this section by Ashlee Dauphinais Civitello and
Luis A. Ortiz-López, titled “Microvariation in the Null Subject Parameter:
Word order in Cuban Spanish” takes the reader to Spanish speakers of Havana,
Cuba with an analysis of subject-verb word order, finding almost invariable SV
word order with first and second subject pronouns and no correlation between
word order and verb type. Moving southward to Argentina, the third paper of
this section by Muriel Gallego is titled “An analysis of subjunctive frequency
and the semantic predictors of mood in Central Argentinian Spanish.” The paper
investigates the use of subjunctive versus indicative moods in terms of both
social and semantic variables and finds there to be significant differences
between age groups.

The fourth paper in this section breaks from the synchronic nature of the
first three with Danielle Daidone and Sarah Zahler’s “The future is in the
past: A diachronic analysis of the variable future-in-the past expression in
Spanish.” The paper examines the evolution of future-in-the past constructions
such as the conditional (e.g., ‘iría’ ‘would go’) and periphrasis of imperfect
‘go’ (e.g., ‘iba a ir’ ‘was going to go’) with data spanning 1580 to 2004. 
The authors find evidence in both their data and others’ for a shift over time
from the synthetic future to the periphrastic. The last contribution of both
this section and the volume, by Miguel Rodríguez-Mondoñedo and Stephen
Fafulas, and titled “Double possession in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish,” returns
to the variationist topic, this time turning attention to the use of double
possession (e.g., ‘mi nombre de mí’ ‘my name of me’) in Peruvian Amazonian
Spanish.  In this chapter, the authors evaluate this construction in terms of
the theories of language contact, naturalistic interlanguage development, or
parametric restructuring.

EVALUATION

>From an organizational perspective, the eighteen papers which comprise nearly
400 pages of text, follow a relatively loose order according to three
overarching topics, as specified in the Introduction and outlined in the
summary section of this review. Interestingly, the book’s Table of Contents
does not reflect this proposed subcategorization; it simply lists all eighteen
papers without any further division into such sections. This lack of book
sections in the Table of Contents, particularly within a book of this size and
depth, makes it a challenge to navigate relevant material without always
returning to the Introduction and skimming it for what one is interested in.
Even in the previous volume (Klassen, Liceras, & Valenzuela, 2015), the
divisions specified in its introduction are maintained in the Table of
Contents.

An additional criticism of the collection in organizational terms is the
failure of the introductory chapter to connect the wide range of topics
covered throughout the volume. This is a significant part of any edited volume
and it is typically penned by editors not only to organize the material within
a book of this size, but it should also provide  the rationale for inclusion
and interconnectedness of each chapter. As it stands, the reader is left with
an introduction of less than three pages and a two-page table of contents. It
is argued here that both the lack of adequate organization of its eighteen
contributions and a short introductory organizational chapter hamper the
accessibility of the material.

Despite the organizational limitations mentioned above, ‘Inquiries’ offers
value to all researchers in the field, whether inside or outside the
classroom, and whatever the methodological framework to which they subscribe.
This is especially true in terms of both the breadth of topical areas that it
covers and the range of Spanish language varieties examined. As for content,
the volume includes papers at all linguistic structural levels of phonology,
morphology and syntax, methodology, and both theoretical, and empirical
analysis. In terms of Spanish language varieties, ‘Inquiries’ offers
data-driven work on Peninsular, Caribbean, South American, as well as United
States Spanish. Figuring among these are studies of less common dialects such
as Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (Rodríguez-Mondoñedo & Fafulas). Also, in
addition to the synchronic perspective, the book also includes a chapter on
historical variation (Daidone and Zahler).

This book is the second of two publications from the Hispanic Linguistics
Symposium series that has recently begun to be published under the Benjamins
Series, Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. This deviates from the
original publishing platform utilized for the first sixteen volumes of the
series, all appearing together at the Cascadilla Proceedings website
(http://www.lingref.com/) as part of the larger Cascadilla Proceedings
Project. It is worth pointing out that since the change in publisher, the
series has witnessed a significant drop in the number of papers published per
volume, with only sixteen papers published from the 17th symposium (Klassen,
Liceras, & Valenzuela, 2015) and eighteen from the 18th symposium (this
volume). In sharp contrast, during its former life with Cascadilla, the series
might issue in one year as many as twenty-nine (Ortiz-López, 2009) or thirty
(Sagarra & Toribio, 2006) papers in a given volume. The Cascadilla proceedings
platform seemed to work extremely well for this series in terms of
accessibility and ease of use by researchers, as it was and continues to be
free to the public.

In some respects, the volume’s detail would make it ideal required reading for
a graduate course in Spanish linguistics. On the other hand, with the guidance
of an instructor, the volume could also be appropriate as additional assigned
reading of selected chapters for students of similar courses at the
undergraduate level. Finally, the book may also serve as introductory reading
for students undertaking special projects across a wide range of topical areas
in Spanish linguistics, as well as further direct them to more in-depth
sources beyond the book itself.

REFERENCES

Colantoni, L. and Cuervo, M.C. (2013). “Clíticos acentuados.” In L. Colantoni
& C. Rodríguez Louro (Eds.). “Perspectivas teóricas y experimentales sobre el
español de la Argentina” (pp. 143-158). Madrid & Frankfurt: Iberoamericana &
Vervuert.

Klassen, Rachel, Liceras Juana M., and Elena Valenzuela, (2015). “Hispanic
Linguistics at the Crossroads: Theoretical linguistics, language acquisition
and language contact. Proceedings of the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium 2013.”

Ortiz-López, Luis A. (Ed.) (2009). “Selected Proceedings of the 13th Hispanic
Linguistics Symposium.” Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Somerville: MA

Sagarra, Nuria and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, Eds. (2006). “Selected
Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium.” Cascadilla Proceedings
Project. Somerville: MA


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

John M. Ryan is Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University
of Northern Colorado. His work on first and second language acquisition
includes articles published in JCLAD, Hispania, and Theory and Practice in
Language Studies. Also, recent work in historical linguistics and discourse
analysis has appeared in several edited volumes. He is currently working on a
project that examines early transitional structures of Proto Ibero Romance.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4123	
----------------------------------------------------------






More information about the LINGUIST mailing list