29.3383, Review: General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Mancera, Martos, García (2015)
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Subject: 29.3383, Review: General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Mancera, Martos, García (2015)
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Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2018 16:44:52
From: Salvatore Callesano [callesano at utexas.edu]
Subject: Patrones sociolingüísticos de Madrid
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-2165.html
EDITOR: Ana M Cestero Mancera
EDITOR: Isabel Molina Martos
EDITOR: Florentino Paredes García
TITLE: Patrones sociolingüísticos de Madrid
SERIES TITLE: Fondo Hispánico de Lingüística y Filología - Volume 21
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Salvatore Callesano, University of Texas at Austin
SUMMARY
Producing an edited volume of research that considers the linguistic
complexity of a heterogeneous urban sociolinguistic context is a challenging
undertaking. Editors Ana M. Cestero Mancera, Isabel Molina Martos, and
Florentino Paredes García achieve this goal in Patrones sociolingüísticos de
Madrid. The edited volume consists of ten chapters written by multiple authors
who follow the traditional subject matter order of the most ‘introduction to
linguistics’ textbooks (i.e. phonetics/phonology, (morpho)syntax, pragmatics,
and discourse) all under the umbrella of sociolinguistic methods and analyses.
The text opens with a prologue, written by Francisco Moreno Fernández, that
describes the historical process that created Madrid’s current centralized and
yet globalized linguistic marketplace. Moreno Fernández explains how political
factors, such as the death of Franco, lead to an increase in innovative
linguistic forms and how now, in the 21st Century, Madrid is becoming more of
an international city comprised of immigrant groups from a range of national
origins.
Chapter 1 - El estudio sociolingüístico de Madrid - Ana M. Cestero Mancera,
Isabel Molina Martos, and Florentino Paredes García
In the first chapter of this volume, “El estudio sociolingüístico de Madrid”,
Mancera, Martos, and García provide the necessary background information to
guide readers through the subsequent analytical chapters. The neighborhoods of
Salamanca and Vallecas provide the geographic context for the chapter, as well
as the book. The neighborhood of Salamanca is located in the urban center of
Madrid and is described as innovative, bourgeois, and of middle-upper class.
On the contrary, Vallecas, located in the periphery of Madrid-city, is
described as a densely populated, sociologically heterogeneous community made
up primarily of immigrants either from other countries or from different
regions in Spain.
The authors present a description of the ‘Proyecto para el estudio
sociolingüístico del español de España y América’ (PRESEEA), which has as a
main goal easing the availability for data comparison and the exchange of
materials across Spain and the Americas. Of particular interest to this edited
volume is PRESEEA-MADRID. A detailed illustration of the PRESSEA-MADRID corpus
is presented with information on who the informants are, how the data are
pre-stratified for sex, age, and education level, post-stratified for social
class, lifestyle (family, leisure, or work-based), and family heritage
(Madrid, northern-Spain, southern-Spain, mix, or other). Most of the methods
that the authors present, probably with the exception of ‘lifestyle’ as an
independent variable, closely follow traditional variationist sociolinguistic
approaches to the study of the language variation (i.e. semi-guided
interviews). Finally, the authors discuss how the immigrant community in
Madrid in not comprised of recent arrivals and they are now considered
‘madrileños’ who are assimilating or have already assimilated to the speech
norms of middle-class Madrid-city for reasons of social mobility.
Finally, the authors describe the main objective of this edited volume as a
rigorous variationist study of a collection of phonetic, lexical,
morphosyntactic, and discursive features of Madrid Spanish with the hopes of
interpreting the sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic processes in the city that
are most relevant to the Hispanic/Latino communities across the world, keeping
in mind the comparative and cooperative goals of PRESEEA.
Capítulo 2 - La conservación de la dental -/d/- en el distrito de Salamanca -
Isabel Molina Martos y Florentino Paredes García
In the first of two sections on phonetic variation, Molina Martos and Paredes
García present an analysis on the retention of intervocalic /d/, specifically
in the Salamanca neighborhood. This chapter presents this feature in a fashion
that opposes typical research - that is the conservation of the variant, as
opposed to its reduction or deletion. In the chapter the authors do consider
three possible realizations, namely the approximant, a reduced variant, and
complete deletion. As the Salamanca neighborhood is a socially prestigious
area of Madrid-city, it is also conservative in its linguistic productions.
The results of the analysis, which are illustrated with Chi-square tests and
Cramer’s V, show 19 significant correlations. For example, when the
intervocalic /d/ is found in a participle, such as –ado, it is likely to be
deleted. The final conclusion of this chapter is that retention of
intervocalic /d/ is a stable feature of Madrid Spanish, at least within the
Salamanca neighborhood.
Capítulo 3 - La variable sociolingüística -/s/ en el distrito de Vallecas
(Madrid) - Isabel Molina Martos
Transitioning to a focus on the Vallecas neighborhood, the author of Chapter 3
presents an variationist analysis of the commonly studied syllable-final /s/.
She considers four possible variant realizations of /s/: [s], [h], consonant
assimilation, and deletion. The analysis conducted is probabilistic using the
Goldvarb software, which included two multiple regressions, one on [s] and the
other on [h]. What makes this chapter stand out is, however, the inclusion of
Spanish immigrants in the region of Vallecas, and this is because immigrants
coming to Madrid from the south the Spain typically aspirate their
syllable-final /s/. However, the findings from this study show that Vallecas,
like Salamanca, is relatively conservative, especially when you compare /s/
production in Vallecas with areas such as Getafe and Alcalá de Hernares.
Variation is found among the different stylistic variables considered and the
results show that people from Vallecas retain coda-/s/ to mark that they are a
part of the Madrid community, yet at the same time they aspirate to mark a
more local/heritage based identity.
Capítulo 4 - Funciones subjetivadoras del diminutivo en el habla de Madrid -
Florentino Paredes García
Chapter 4 moves to a sociolinguistic analysis of a morphological variable,
specifically eight variants the diminutive suffix: -ito, -illo, -ete, -ico,
-uelo, -in(o), -ejo, and –uco (with their respective gender and number
inflections). The author dedicates a lot of time to a description of the
variants on various analytical scales. On a scale from more objective to more
subjective, the author describes the functions and valuations of Spanish
diminutives (e.g. lexicalizing, quantifying, and qualifying). All results are
described descriptively with Chi-square analyses. The data show that the
–ito is the most common diminutive variant in Madrid (62.8%) but also that is
used across all of the functions studied. –illo appears in the data often as
well (19.1%) but the author argues that this diminutive suffix is currently in
a process of lexicalization. In terms of functions, madrileños tend to use
diminutives for quantification when highlighting size and also to decentralize
the object as not a prototypical example. Regional, gender, and age
differences are also found. For example, the author claims that the female
speakers use more subjective functions, as opposed to objective, arguing that
women’s speech is more personal than men’s speech.
Chapter 5 - Integración sociolingüística de los inmigrantes ecuatorianos en
Madrid: datos sobre el diminutivo según los corpus ISPIE-MADRID y
PRESEEA-MADRID - María Sancho Pascual
Transitioning from Chapter 4, the author aims to further the discussion of the
Spanish diminutive, however this time in terms of the integration of the
Ecuadorian immigrant community in Madrid. Where Chapter 4 described the
treatment of diminutives of the general Madrid community from PREESEA-MADRID,
Chapter 5 asks how the Ecuadorians converge or diverge linguistically. This
work uses 12 interviews from the ISPIE-MADRID corpus, pre-coded for
participant sex and length of residency in Madrid. A total of 250 diminutives
were considered in the coding process; however 190 were analyzed. Lexicalized
suffixes (N = 60) were excluded from the analysis. Overall, the author
suggests that the Ecuadorian population in Madrid seems to be converging
towards the patterns used by the madrileños. Yet, at the same time, evidence
of divergence is found. The two diminutives that the Ecuadorians are
incorporating into their newfound linguistic repertoire are primarily –illo
and –ete. The author claims that, based on a qualitative analysis of the data,
the adoption of these new diminutive forms is more likely to occur when the
migratory process is not linked to family. The authors states that this
hypothesis still requires more data to reach a confident conclusion.
Chapter 6 - Nuevos datos sobre el uso y las funciones de los pronombre átonos
de tercera persona en Madrid - Florentino Paredes García
Paredes García analyses the frequencies of variable third person clitic
pronouns (e.g. le, lo, la, les, los, las) in Madrid. The data come from 30
minutes of 108 semi-directed interviews within the PRESEEA corpus. The author
first presents a broad analysis of the respective absolute and relative
frequencies. The subsequent analyses are more detailed and restrict the data
set to variables such as syntactic function. Overall, leísmo is a widely used
structure in Madrid Spanish, while laísmo is used somewhat, and loísmo is
virtually absent from the population sample. The chapter also dedicates a
large portion to the etymological characteristics of the pronoun use. Although
generally stable, variation was found among the individual speakers, motivated
by sociolinguistic integration. For example, in this chapter, leaders of a
change are found to be men above 40 with little education, suggesting that
others are avoiding stigmatized variants due to social pressures.
Chapter 7 - Las locuciones verbales en el habla de Madrid (distrito de
Salamanca) - Inmaculada Penadés Martínez
With a focus on the Salamanca neighborhood, the author analyzes phrasal verbs
considering both idiomatic (romper el hielo) and non-idiomatic examples (darse
cuenta) The data come from PRESEEA and a total of 263 phrasal verbs used in
the analysis (160 idiomatic and 102 non-idiomatic). Considering the amount of
data available in the corpus, this is a low token count, which leads the
author to state that these features do not constitute a characteristic feature
of the neighborhood. The statistical representation of the data in this
chapter is descriptive. The chapter also discusses the notion of linguistic
“register” and notes that even in colloquial speech, phrasal verbs are not
common. The author also describes some examples of variation found within the
sample. For example, there is a gender difference where women use more
informal verbal phrases than the men. Crucially, the author concludes with a
methodological remark, stating that the best approach to studying verbal
phrases might be with direct measures such as those seen in surveys.
Chapter 8 - Estudio sociolingüístico del tabú en el habla de Madrid: propuesta
metodológica y primeros resultados - Ana M. Cestero Mancera
Following a recently developed trend in sociolinguistic studies, Cestero
Mancera presents a preliminary analysis of taboo words. She conceptualizes
linguistic taboo in the following fashion: ancestral, which consists of
magic/religion/fear (religion, the supernatural, death, and sickness) and
social, which consists of sexual (acts/conducts, body parts,
conditions/options), scatological (acts, body parts, objects/places), and
social respect (social differences, family relations, and undesirable
actions/personal shortcomings). Since taboo language is a social product, it
is an ideal variable for sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic analyses and not
much previous research has been conducted on such a topic, especially in
Spanish. The data also come from the PRESEEA corpus and the goal is to
discover the sociolinguistic patterns of the use of taboo in Madrid. In
addition, Cestero Mancera incorporates a survey on language use into her data
collection methods, following the requirements for PRESEEA. In this pilot
analysis, 18 interviews are used, balanced by gender, age, and education
level. The results show that, of 726 expressions, 41% (298) refer to the
social category, 30% to the sexual, 25% to the magical/religious, and 4% to
the scatological. Significant differences are found for educational level and
age, however the results show no difference according to gender.
Chapter 9 - Estrategias de atenuación en el barrio de Salamanca de Madrid -
Isabel Molina Martos
Continuing with studies on sociopragmatics, Molina Martos presents an analysis
of linguistic attenuation in the Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid. Linguistic
attenuation is essentially how interlocutors reduce disagreement in order to
achieve the goal of the conversation. There is a balance between what is
referred to as a negative image – the hope that each individual has that their
actions will not be impeded – and a positive image – how individuals views
themselves and the hope that this is recognized by the other. For example,
when we congratulate someone, we are attending to their positive image and
when we give someone an order, we go against their negative image. This topic
is closely related to linguistic affiliation or autonomy. The data for this
sociolinguistic analysis come from the PRESEEA corpus, using 18 speakers from
Salamanca stratified by sex, education level, age, and social class. Totals of
attenuation examples were not counted, however the author counted for
conversational turns (N = 886) that included at least one attenuation. The
results show that the inferior relationship that the interviewee has to the
interviewer plays a role in linguistic attenuation. There is also an age
difference, where the younger speakers attend more to their personal image and
as speakers get older they start to balance out the two strategies.
Chapter 10 - La atenuación lingüística en el habla de Madrid: un fenómeno
sociopragámatico variable - Ana M. Cestero Mancera
The final chapter of this edited volume attends to the same feature addressed
in Chapter 9, however in the Vallecas neighborhood. The approach taken by
Cestero Mancera in this chapter is interdisciplinary, with influence from
conversation analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and speech act theory.
Eighteen interviewers are used from the PRESEEA corpus. The dependent variable
is the type of attenuation: dicum (reduction of meaning), modus (reduction of
illocutionary force), and dictum and modus (reduction of both). In addition,
25 linguistic resources related to attenuation are detailed. In this
population subsample, there is significant variation conditioned by the social
backgrounds of the speakers. Men attenuate more than women, adults more than
young speakers, and finally those with higher education more than those with
lower levels of education. The most common type of attenuation is modus,
followed by dictum and modus, and then lastly dictum.
EVALUATION
The goal of this edited volume is to present an overview of Madrid’s
contemporary linguistic patterns, and the cohort of authors are certainly
successful in that endeavor. Patrones sociolingüísticos de Madrid presents a
wide range of sociolinguistic analyses, ideal for an academic audience. In
particular, scholars of the variationist paradigm and especially to those who
conduct sociolinguistic analyses with corpus data will find the book to be
quite valuable. The empirical nature of each chapter qualifies the volume as
rigorous, with attention paid to detail.
The edition as a whole would benefit from attention to variationist
sociolinguistic frameworks. Research in variationist sociolinguistics, such as
Labov (1966), would not only better support the authors’ arguments, but allow
for cross-linguistic comparisons of the sociolinguistic patterns found in this
volume. With regard to certain social factors, such as gender (see conclusions
of Chapter 4) the field of sociolinguistics has advanced over the past few
decades with a call to avoid discussing truly heterogeneous categories as
homogeneous and static entities (Eckert 1989). In addition, recent examples of
Spanish dialect contact (e.g. Otheguy and Zentella 2012) and immigrant
integration would have made certain conclusions of this volume more profound.
The statistical analyses that were conducted in these studies would have been
strengthened with more contemporary methods, such as regression models. With
the large amount data available to them in the different corpora, the authors
have an opportunity to run more sophisticated, inferential analyses and to
quantitatively examine the relationships between multiple factors.
To conclude, the book presents a useful resource for sociolinguists interested
in sociolinguistic variation in Madrid, whether the variable of interest is
phonetic, morphosyntactic, or pragmatic. Overall, by presenting various
analyses of linguistic patterns across socially distinguished neighborhoods
and the integration of a recently arrived community, the authors have achieved
their goal of presenting a contemporary view of Madrid Spanish and
successfully provided a tool for future researchers in the field.
REFERENCES
Eckert, P. 1989. The whole woman: sex and gender differences in variation.
Language Variation
and Change 1(3): 245-267.
Labov, W. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City.
Cambridge University
Press.
Otheguy, R. y A.C. Zentella. 2012. Spanish in New York: language contact,
dialect leveling, and
structural continuity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Salvatore Callesano is a graduate student studying Linguistics in the
Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. He
specializes in sociolinguistics, language variation and change, and language
perception/attitudes, with particular interests in U.S. Latina/o communities.
He has conducted phonetic variation research in Buenos Aires and in Miami he
has investigated language attitudes towards varieties of Spanish, implicit
biases towards Spanish and English, and the relationship between the Miami
English lexicon and perceived identities. He has lived in New York, Buenos
Aires, Madrid, and Miami and is currently studying the interaction of
linguistic variation, bilingualism, and immigration in Miami.
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