32.592, Review: Romance; Linguistic Theories; Sociolinguistics: Ortiz López, Guzzardo Tamargo, González-Rivera (2020)
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Subject: 32.592, Review: Romance; Linguistic Theories; Sociolinguistics: Ortiz López, Guzzardo Tamargo, González-Rivera (2020)
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Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2021 23:15:09
From: Marina Cuartero [marinacuartero at outlook.com]
Subject: Hispanic Contact Linguistics
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1236.html
EDITOR: Luis A. Ortiz López
EDITOR: Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo
EDITOR: Melvin González-Rivera
TITLE: Hispanic Contact Linguistics
SUBTITLE: Theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives
SERIES TITLE: Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 22
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2020
REVIEWER: Marina Cuartero, University of Florida
SUMMARY
This volume addresses a selection of issues about current research trends of
Spanish in contact with other languages all around the world. Its
interdisciplinary perspective provides insight into theoretical linguistics,
bilingualism, and second language acquisition. The editors, Luis A. Ortiz,
Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo and Melvin González-Rivera, selected thirteen
articles presented at the 8th International Workshop on Spanish
Sociolinguistics (University of Puerto Rico, 2016) and researched by
distinguished academics in Hispanic Linguistics.
The articles are organized into six parts, each one dealing with a subfield of
study. Part I (ch. 1-3) tackles theoretical issues in Afro-Hispanic dialects
and methodological approaches in heritage language studies; Part II (ch. 4-5)
comprises studies on speech production in Peru, Chile and Mexico; Part III
(ch. 6-8) deals with morphology in bilingual speakers from Spanish-English in
the United States and Spanish-Catalan in Spain; Part IV (ch. 9-10) covers
syntax in Brazilian Portuguese-Spanish contact; Part V (ch. 11-13) comprises
language variation, linguistic perception, and attitudes in Puerto Rico, Peru,
and Spain. Below is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the 13 chapters:
In Chapter 1 “The New Spanishes in the context of contact linguistics”, Donald
Winford revisited Weinreich’s (1953) unified approach, whose comprehensive
model of language contact accounts for social, linguistic, and
psycholinguistic factors. Winford linked this approach to naturalistic second
language acquisition processes in the emergence of Hispanic colonial dialects
from Spanish in contact with other languages. In this integrated framework,
creoles and other contact varieties created a continuum from close
approximations to the substrate/colonizer language (e.g., General
Latin-American Spanish) to more proximity to substrate/indigenous/African
language (e.g., Palenquero, Papiamentu).
In Chapter 2, Sandro Sessarego focused on the Afro-Hispanic language formation
in the Department of Chocó (Colombia). He contended that the two main
hypotheses on the genesis of Chocó Spanish, the Decreolization Hypothesis
(Granda, 1977; Schwegler, 1991a, 1991b) and the Afrogenesis Hypothesis
(McWorther, 2000) are invalid. Instead, he claimed that historic data showed
that this region did not present the characteristics associated with creole
formation in other colonies. This was because most slaves did not come from
Africa but other locations in Colombia and the Caribbean, and they would speak
Spanish natively; hence they would not have shared an African language
stratum. Later, the isolation of the region would not have allowed a
decreolization after being in contact with more standard Spanish. Sessarego
argued that Chocó Spanish may be better analyzed as a by-product of advanced
SLA strategies.
In Chapter 3, “Methodological considerations in the heritage language studies”
Zoe McManmon compared two research methodologies on Spanish heritage speakers
in the US (Chicago) to show the impact of data collection techniques in
participant accuracy. For this matter, she researched gender agreement in
children with different access to a strong Spanish social network and access
to heritage language instruction. The methodologies compared were
sociolinguistic interviews and story retelling tasks. Children with reduced
social network and heritage language instruction showed lower accuracy on
gender agreement in the story retelling task than children with a dense SN
and/or HLI, but all participants had higher agreement levels and similar
results in the sociolinguistic interview. McManmon concluded that there was a
methodological difference and she drew attention to the variety of data that
child bilinguals can produce when examined with different methods.
Chapter 4, “Social change and /s/ variation in Concepción, Chile and Lima,
Peru” by Brandon M.A. Roger and Carol A. Klee investigated the evolution of
/s/ pronunciation as a societal marking. In Concepción, in contrast with
previous studies in other Chilean regions, the elision was more present than
aspiration. The driving factors were gender and education, with less educated
speakers and male speakers eliding more, without negative stereotypes
associated to it. In Lima, /s/ variation was a salient marker of socioeconomic
and dialect difference that categorizes speakers in Andean immigrants
(sibilant use), middle-class Limeños (aspiration), and working-class Limeños
(elision). By contrasting corpora data, the authors concluded that linguistic
outcomes depend on the sociohistorical context.
In Chapter 5, “Con acento pujado in Yucatán Spanish”, Jim Michnowicz and Alex
Hyler analyzed prosodic differences in Yucatan Spanish, which has a
distinctive and stereotyped halting/trained accent. Since Maya has different
consonant durations than Spanish, Yucatan Spanish is described as the result
of this influence on vocalic and consonantal intervals. The researchers
carried out sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish monolinguals and
Maya-Spanish bilinguals from different age groups and gender. Their results
revealed that younger speakers in general were distancing from more
traditional rhythmic patterns. The authors also indicated that women produced
more stress-timed patterns to distinguish themselves from the stigmatized YS
rhythm while identifying as yucatecas.
Chapter 6, “First person singular subject expression in Caribbean heritage
speaker Spanish oral production” by Ana de Prada Pérez, examined the
distribution of overt pronominal subjects in the Spanish of Caribbean heritage
speakers in Florida from different generations and proficiency levels. Similar
research carried out in NYC found that a high frequency of overt pronouns is
largely attributed to contact with English (e.g. Otheguy and Zentella, 2012).
With a sociolinguistic interview, de Prada Pérez measured rate and patterns of
overt pronouns. Her results showed that participants reported lower rates of
overt pronouns, except for the lower proficiency group who did show an effect
on switch reference patterns. The author concluded that it is the proficiency
and not contact with English that produced a higher rate of overt pronominal
subjects.
Chapter 7, by Cecily Corbett, Juanita Reyes, and Lotfi Sayahi, researched the
use of the Present Perfect Indicative in New York Dominican Spanish. Studies
on Present Perfect in the US claim that compound tenses decreased in favor of
simpler tenses (e.g. Silva-Corvalán, 2014), however, there was a high degree
of language loyalty among Dominicans in the US (Toribio, 2000a). They
collected data on Present Perfect maintenance and described contexts compared
to Preterit with sociolinguistic interviews. They found that there was a
relationship between participant age of arrival and the extension of the
Present Perfect into innovative uses, especially in NY-born and participants
arrived before age 5. Their findings asserted that the morphology of the
Present Perfect in Dominican Spanish in New York was almost intact, and it was
canonical in most cases.
In Chapter 8, “Transfer and convergence between Catalan and Spanish in a
bilingual setting”, Amelia Jiménez-Gaspar, Acrisio Pires y Pedro
Guijarro-Fuentes investigated the production of third-person clitics in
Catalan from Majorca. This is a bilingual setting in which Spanish is the
majority language and would allow for semantic and morphological transfer
(Blas Arroyo, 2011). From interviews with Catalan-Spanish bilinguals, they
observed that the Catalan neutral clitic ho showed a semantic extension of lo,
as well as the use of lo and los in Majorcan Catalan in some speakers.
Moreover, as another pattern of convergence with Spanish, they noticed a
widespread regularization of enclitic forms following the consonant-vowel
patterns. However, they did not find a substantial convergence between the two
languages.
Chapter 9 is entitled “The distribution and use of present and past
progressive forms in Spanish-English and Spanish-Brazilian Portuguese
bilinguals”, by Julio César López Otero and Alejandro Cuza. They selected
heritage speakers of Spanish in the US and Brazil for a semi-spontaneous
production task (i.e., wordless storybook). These two language pairs
presented different verbal tense constraints: simple present and progressive
are used for ongoing meaning in Spanish, but this is not the case for
Brazilian Portuguese or English, and Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese have two
forms for expressing past progressive, but English only has one. The results
showed that participants experienced crosslinguistic effects from their
dominant languages in different ways: English speakers preferred progressive
forms and Brazilian Portuguese speakers favored more simple forms.
In Chapter 10, “Portuguese-Spanish contacts in Misiones, Argentina”, John M.
Lipski investigates code-switching instances in the Brazilian frontier.
Firstly, he collected L2 Portuguese spoken by Spanish-speaking countries
(Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela) that
border Brazil and found that there were very few instances of code-switching,
among those, native speakers who had acquired Portuguese informally as an L2
produced some combinations that contravened grammatical infelicities of
intra-sentential code-switching. Then, bilingual participants from the
Misiones province participated in 3 tasks: utterance translation, language
classification, and elicited repetition. This second group provided evidence
that certain grammatical categories were implicitly regarded as more
felicitous than other intra-sentential language switches.
Chapter 11 is “Real perception or perceptive accommodation? The Dominirican
ethnic-dialect continuum and sociolinguistic context”. Authors Luis A. Ortiz
López and Cristina Martínez Pedraza utilized a verbal guise task to test
dialect recognition and linguistic perceptions of the marginalized community
of Dominicans in Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans were presented with recordings
from the Dominican-Puerto Rican generation continuum: newly arrived
Dominicans, established Dominicans, Puerto Rican Dominicans, Dominiricans, and
Puerto Rican. They listened and assigned extralinguistic variables (e.g.,
education, affability). Participants showed solidarity patterns and positive
attitudes towards the recording of fellow Puerto Ricans, but as the continuum
approached the Dominicans, the recordings were judged less positively. This
suggested that dialect perception and attitudes correlated with the perception
of nationality and extralinguistic characteristics.
In Chapter 12, “Andean Spanish and Provinciano identity” Daniela Salcedo
Arnaiz analyzed attitudes and ideologies that residents of Lima have towards
Andean Spanish and its speakers to distinguish the combination of power,
status, and its association with language use. Andean Spanish is spoken by a
dialectal continuum of indigenous bilinguals and monolinguals and it is a
stigmatized variety in the capital. Limeños and provincianos (Andean migrants)
were asked to judge modified recordings (matched-guise task) that contained
recordings with Andean Spanish morphosyntax phenomena, but not phonological
cues. Many of the participants did not perceive the difference, but limeños
gave more negative judgements than provincianos. This indicated that certain
features of Andean Spanish morphosyntax might index Provinciano identity and
that language attitudes are manifestations of locally constructed language
ideologies (Milroy, 2004).
Chapter 13 “On the effects of Catalan contact in the variable expression of
Spanish future tense” by Andrés Enrique-Arias, Beatriz Méndez Guerrero
compared the realization of Morphological Future and Periphrastic Future in a
monolingual setting (Alcalá de Henares, Madrid) and a bilingual setting
(Palma, Majorca). There is a historical trend of a decrease in Morphological
Future in favor of Periphrastic Future (e.g., Aaron, 2010). However, in areas
where Catalan is spoken, there is more Morphological Future retention since
Catalan only has one expression of futurity. Authors extracted biographical
data as well as linguistic data from the PRESEEA corpus and their results
confirm that greater levels of Catalan dominance entailed more uses of
Morphological Future. In Alcalá, Morphological Future use was considerably
low; in Palma, although higher (double cases), authors also concluded the
possibility of a change in progress towards the use of Periphrastic Future,
and thus follow the pan-Hispanic trend.
EVALUATION
As a recent volume in the series Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics
(John Benjamins), it sheds light on less explored language pairs (e.g.
Majorcan Catalan-Spanish), formulates potential language changes (e.g.
Yucatecan Spanish, Chapter 5), and offers ideas on the relation
proficiency-variation for future research. Moreover, it adds to the debate on
code-switching constraints (Chapter 10) and creole formation hypothesis
(Chapters 1 and 2).
Ortiz-López, Guzzardo Tamargo, and González-Rivera did an excellent job in
collecting intricate phenomena from the Spanish-speaking world. However, a
weakness of this book is that the article division in parts seemed somewhat
artificial. For instance, in Part I creole formation concepts are grouped with
research methodologies; Part VI includes language attitudes and ideologies
with morphological variation. This last article seems unrelated to the
preceding ones given that Chapter 8 also shares that young Catalan speakers
show more influence from Spanish than older speakers. Personally, a
geographical division could help the reader to locate themselves in a specific
linguistic context that is shared by neighbouring communities.
This volume will be an excellent resource to researchers and (graduate)
students because the diverse topics provide a wide perspective, methodological
orientation, and understudied areas for future research. Besides corpus
studies and interviews, the use of matched-guise task/verbal guise task was
especially valuable because it was an accurate tool for measuring language
ideologies and attitudes (Chapters 11 and 12), and the sociolinguistic
interview was appropriate for assessing heritage speaker proficiency (Chapter
3). Thus, the reader not only gains from the article implications but also
from the utilized methodology.
Overall, this volume is a welcomed addition to the field because it contains a
wide collection of articles on language contact from all around the
Spanish-speaking world. Additionally, it is a balanced selection that covers
theoretical to more specific fields, such as phonetics or sociolinguistics,
Spanish as a heritage language, and creole languages.
REFERENCES
Aaron, J.E. (2010) Pushing the envelope: Looking beyond the variable context.
Language variation and Change, 22, 1-36.
Blas Arroyo, J.L. (2011). Spanish in contact with Catalan. In M. Diaz-Camps
(Ed.), The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics (pp. 374–394). Malden, MA:
Blackwell
Granda, G de. (1970). Un temprano testimonio sobre las hablas ‘criollas’ en
África y América. Thesaurus, 25 (1), 1-11.
McWorther, J. (2000). The missing Spanish Creoles. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Milroy, L. (2004). Language ideologies and linguistic change. In C. Fought
(Ed.), Sociolinguistic variation: Critical reflections (pp. 161-177). New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Otheguy, R., & Zentella, A.C. (2012). Spanish in New York. Language contact,
dialectal levelling, and structural continuity. Oxford: Oxford University
Press
Schwegler, A. (1991a). El habla cotidiana del Chocó (Colombia). América Negra,
2, 85-119.
Schwegler, B. (1991b). La doble negación dominicana y la génesis del español
caribeño. Lingüística, 3, 31-88.
Weinreich, U. (1953). A general and unified theory of the transmission in
language contact. Heidelberg: Winter.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Marina Cuartero is a Ph. D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics at the
University of Florida. Her primary research interest lie in the field of
languages in contact, heritage language acquisition, endangered languages,
language revitalization and sociolinguistics.
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