25.278, Review: Sociolinguistics; Spanish: Carvalho & Beaudrie (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-278. Wed Jan 15 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.278, Review: Sociolinguistics; Spanish: Carvalho & Beaudrie (2013)

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Reviews: 
Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin Madison
Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin Madison
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin Madison
Mateja Schuck, U of Wisconsin Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin Madison
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Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 17:39:12
From: Whitney Chappell [whitney.chappell at gmail.com]
Subject: Selected Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics

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EDITOR: Ana Maria Carvalho
EDITOR: Sara M. Beaudrie
TITLE: Selected Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics
SERIES TITLE: Cascadilla Proceedings Project
PUBLISHER: Cascadilla Press
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Whitney Chappell, The University of Texas at San Antonio

SUMMARY

As noted by the editors, Ana M. Carvalho and Sara Beaudrie, the Workshops on
Spanish Sociolinguistics (WSS) unite scholars focused on a single language
from multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives, engendering lively
debates from diverse viewpoints. The ‘Selected Proceedings of the 6th Workshop
on Spanish Sociolinguistics’ is the outcome of the WSS series’ most recent
gathering, compiling eighteen peer-reviewed papers stemming from research
presented in April 2012 at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The volume is divided into three major sections: 1) Variation and Change, 2)
Language Contact, and 3) Language Attitudes and Perception.

The first contribution in the Variation and Change section, “‘Yo a mí me
parece’: la gramaticalización de ‘yo’ como marcador de discurso en el español
coloquial” (“‘I to me it seems’: The Grammaticalization of ‘yo’ (‘I’) as a
Discourse Marker in Colloquial Spanish”), comes from Carmen Ruiz-Sánchez, who
contends that left-dislocated ‘yo’ (I) is undergoing grammaticalization in
spoken Spanish. Based on an analysis of two corpora, the author demonstrates
that left-dislocated ‘yo’ occurs without any apparent syntactic function in
the following contexts: alongside psychological, pseudoimpersonal, transitive,
and intransitive verbs; in impersonal and dislocated structures; in phrases
indicative of possession; and with 1st person plural conjugations.

In the second article, “Puerto Rican Intensifiers: Bien/Muy Variables”, Esther
L. Brown and Mayra Cortés-Torres find that ‘bien’ (good) is much more frequent
than ‘muy’ (very) as an adjectival intensifier in Puerto Rican Spanish. In
social terms, women and younger speakers use ‘bien’ more than men and older
speakers, and when the adjective being modified is variable in its positive or
negative connotations, e.g., ‘grande’ (big) or ‘diferente’ (different), ‘bien’
is more likely with the positive meaning. A more nuanced analysis reveals that
young men and young women are using the intensifiers in different ways; while
young women use ‘bien’ more with a positive variable adjective, young men
actually use the intensifier slightly more with negative variable adjectives,
demonstrating a differential use of the intensifier by gender.

In “Las funciones de venga como intensificador en el español peninsular” (“The
Functions of ‘venga’ (come) as an Intensifier in Peninsular Spanish”),
Inmaculada Garnes discusses the evolution of the present subjunctive form of
‘venir’ (to come) in Peninsular Spanish based on her research in blogs and
forums. Originating as a verb of motion, ‘venga’ evolved to be a discourse
marker expressing disagreement, and Garnes contends that the form has more
recently been reanalyzed as a particle with a reiterative function alongside
infinitives and as an adverbial quantifier alongside nouns.

The fourth contribution, “Haya vs. Haiga: An Analysis of the Variation
Observed in Mexican Spanish Using a Mixed Effects Model”, by Mary Johnson and
Sonia Barnes, explores lexical alternation between two present subjunctive
forms of ‘haber’ (there is/there are). Based on data from three corpora, the
authors show that the least educated speakers use ‘haiga’ significantly more
than the most educated in both Monterrey and Mexico City, and that in
Monterrey Spanish an interaction exists between education and type of use:
within the least educated group, ‘haiga’ is significantly more likely as a
presentational. The authors contend the productivity of the verb may explain
the continuing synchronic variation and note that individuals display a
tendency to use one form over the other.

Next, Chad Howe and Celeste Rodríguez Louro discuss variation between the
present perfect and present in Continuative/Durative domains across dialects
of Spanish in “Peripheral Envelopes: Spanish Perfects in the Variable
Context”.  Arguing that this variation is distinct from preterit and present
perfect variation, the authors use their corpus-based results to conduct a
multivariate analysis with ‘desde hace’ (for some time) as the distinguishing
criteria. They find that the present occurs at much higher rates overall and
that verb type and interval duration condition the selection of the present
perfect over the present tense, with the present perfect favored by telic
verbs. The authors also note dialectal differences, with Argentina and Spain
preferring the present with ‘desde hace’ constructions, while Mexico shows
more variation between the present and present perfect.

In the following article, “Generalized Conversational Implicatures and
Indexical Fields: The Case of Address Forms”, Sarah Sinnott proposes a
relationship between address forms and Indexical Fields (Eckert 2008),
creating a model to address both the what and the how of Spanish address
forms. By including a hierarchical model of the indexical field associated
with address forms, Sinnott is able to distinguish between different levels of
“defaultness”, with the most central indices from the more context-dependent
indices in separate layers of the model.

“Second-Language Development of Variable Future-Time Expression in Spanish”,
by Aarnes Gudmestad and Kimberly Geeslin, analyzes variation among L2 Spanish
speakers’ and L1 Spanish speakers’ use of the morphological (synthetic)
future, the periphrastic (analytic) future, and the present. Based on a
multinomial logistic regression analysis with temporal distance, lexical
temporal indicators, and uncertainty markers as the independent variables,
Gudmestad and Geeslin find that learners initially make use of a 1:1 form to
function relationship to express the future but later move towards native-like
variation of future expression. However, the authors find that even the most
advanced learners fail to reach fully native-like patterns of future-time
expression.

The following article, “Asturian Identity Reflected in Pronoun Use: Enclisis
and Proclisis Patterns in Asturian Spanish”, by Verónica González López,
argues that Asturian identity is reflected through enclisis, e.g. ‘Vilu leer’
(I saw him read). Using semi-spontaneous interviews and a language
questionnaire with 35 speakers, González López conducts a VarbRul analysis,
determining that those who report both languages as their L1 or Asturian as
their L1 show higher rates of enclisis, those who grew up during Franco’s
dictatorship use lower rates of enclisis than older and younger speakers, and
men use higher rates of enclisis than women. Some results are more confusing,
i.e., those who self-report their identity as Spanish use enclisis the most
and those reporting Asturian as their ‘lengua propia’ (own language) are least
likely to use enclisis. The author claims that these results may have more to
do with political factors than with language and identity. González López
concludes that Asturian is becoming destigmatized based on higher rates of
self-identification and enclisis following standardization and normalization
efforts.

The Language Contact section of the volume begins with Sandro Sessarego’s
paper, “Some Remarks on the Origin of Chota Valley Spanish”, in which he
argues that the Afro-Hispanic vernacular spoken near Imbabura and Carchi,
Ecuador does not have an Afro-Portuguese creole origin as argued by Schwegler
(1999). According to Sessarego, the morphosyntactic features of Chota Valley
Spanish do not suggest a Creole origin, but rather a “substandard” second
language variety of Spanish. Additionally, the author argues that ‘ele’,
previously explained as a pronoun derived from Portuguese, is actually a
topic/focus marker in Chota Valley Spanish, which weakens the Creole
hypothesis. Social factors do not support the hypothesis either, as the low
ratio of whites to blacks, large-scale introduction of Africans, and limited
contact with Spanish speakers (Schwegler 1999: 240) expected in the creation
of a Creole are not supported by the literature.

The following paper, “Habitual Aspect Marking in Palenquero: Variation in
Present Temporal Reference”, comes from Hiram L. Smith, who investigates the
distribution of tense and aspect forms in the expression of the habitual
aspect. Smith finds that the habitual is expressed with the preverbal particle
‘asé’ and zero. Furthermore, while the progressive marker ‘ta’ appears in
habitual contexts, the habitual marker ‘asé’ never encroaches upon progressive
contexts. Finally, Smith notes that ‘asé’ is highly favored in frequentative
and affirmative contexts and proposes that this may indicate
grammaticalization within the Palenquero tense-aspect system.

Hilary Barnes and Jim Michnowicz investigate “Peak Alignment in
Semi-spontaneous Bilingual Chipilo Spanish” in the next article, focusing on a
case of sustained language contact and bilingualism in Puebla, Mexico between
Spanish and Veneto, a language of northern Italy maintained among the
immigrant population. Like other dialects of Italian (Colantoni & Gurlekian
2004), Veneto exhibits early peak alignment in prenuclear position in contrast
with the delayed peak alignment found across non-contact dialects of Spanish.
Barnes and Michnowicz discover high rates of early peak alignment, and they
claim that increased contact with Spanish does not serve as a predictor of
more delayed prenuclear peaks. The authors conclude that young Chipilo Spanish
speakers are not adjusting their intonation to mirror Mexican Spanish and that
this early peak alignment is used to reflect their Chipileño identity.

In “One Construction, Two Sources Languages: Hacer with an English Infinitive
in Bilingual Discourse”, Damián Vergara Wilson contends that ‘hacer’ + V is a
hybrid, productive construction in which the verb ‘hacer’ (to do/make) has
undergone grammaticalization in bilingual discourse. Vergara Wilson argues
that the loss of lexical meaning in these hybrid structures, in favor of
communicating only tense, aspect, and mood, represents a case of bleaching, a
key characteristic of grammaticalization (Bybee 2010). Finally, because the
‘hacer’ + V structure does not neatly fit into the categories of convergence,
codeswitching, or borrowing, the author proposes that the structure supports
the existence of a separate ‘bilingual discourse mode’ in which both languages
and processing mechanisms are activated and capable of producing new forms.

Naomi Lapidus Shin provides the following paper, “Women as Leaders of Language
Change: A Qualification from the Bilingual Perspective”. Drawing upon the
widely attested phenomenon of women leading linguistic change in monolingual
settings (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003; Labov 2001), Lapidus Shin notes that
a women effect also appears to be at work in bilingual settings based on her
corpus analysis, with women using more overt pronouns in their Spanish than
men. Additionally, pronoun rates increase with years lived in the US, which is
indicative of a change in progress. Lapidus Shin argues that this difference
is due to the more extensive contact women have with US-born Latinos,
including their children, which drives higher pronoun use. She concludes that
current explanations of the women effect in monolingual communities must be
expanded to account for women in bilingual communities as well.

In “Language Transmission among Catalan and Galician Immigrants in New York
City”, Eva Juarros-Daussà investigates 20 multilingual families living in New
York City from Galicia and Catalonia. While both groups come from bilingual
regions in Spain in which the regional language is minoritized, their language
attitudes, language transmission, and the connection felt between language and
identity differs greatly. Juarros-Daussà contends that this difference is due
to the Catalonian monoglossic ideology, which promotes a single linguistic
norm and a central identity based on language, and the Galician heteroglossic
ideology, which is defined by the coexistence of different linguistic norms,
and identity is based on this diversity. While both populations hope to pass
their Galician or Catalan identity onto their children, Juarros-Daussà finds
that the monoglossic ideology leads to greater maintenance of the minority
language in New York City while the heteroglossic ideology leads to identity
maintenance outside of the linguistic sphere.

Ann Marie Delforge contributes the first article of the Language Attitudes and
Perception section, entitled “Not Correct but Not Bad Either: Another Look at
the Social Meaning of ‘Velar r’ in Puerto Rican Spanish”. In order to
indirectly measure attitudes towards velar R, Delforge uses a matched guise
technique with 115 participants from San Juan and the Southern Coast. After
listening to professional Puerto Rican actors who produced two readings (one
with the velar R and one with [r]), the participants’ responses indicate that
the negative connotations associated with the “incorrectness” of R are
assuaged by its widespread use in Puerto Rico among different social groups.
Delforge concludes that R is only stigmatized in Puerto Rico if stigma is
defined as an awareness of the feature’s non-standardness, but the
participants’ claims and guise ratings indicate that even professionals are
associated with velar R use.

The second paper from the final section comes from Elena Schoonmaker-Gates,
who discusses “The Interplay Between Native Spanish Dialect Exposure and
Foreign Accent Perception”. Using the speech of two native Spanish speakers
from central Spain and two non-native Spanish speakers, Schoonmaker-Gates had
160 non-native Spanish speakers and 26 native speakers evaluate how
foreign-sounding the samples were. The author finds that non-native listeners
with exposure to more dialects of Spanish rated the native Spanish speech as
less foreign-sounding, and native Spanish speakers with exposure to more
diverse dialects also rated the Peninsular speakers as less foreign-sounding.
These results indicate that speech perception is malleable (Evans & Iverson
2007) and exposure to a variety of dialects influences both native and
non-native speakers’ perceptions of foreignness.

Joseph Vincent Casillas discusses perceptions of the fricativized affricate
/ʧ/ in Tucson, Arizona in his paper “La fricativización del africado /ʧ/:
actitudes lingüísticas cerca de la frontera”. In order to explore perceptions
of the fricativized variant, which occurs in multiple dialects across the
Spanish-speaking world, Casillas recorded two men and two women from Tucson
reading a script with either the affricate or fricativized realization of /ʧ/
and randomly played either the /ʃ/ or /ʧ/ condition for 122 participants who
rated the speakers on competence, solidarity, and credibility. Casillas
concludes that the speakers using the fricativized realization received lower
ratings of competence, likely because it is the non-standard variant.

The final contribution of the proceedings is “Regional Variation in the
Perception of Sociophonetic Variants of Spanish /s/”, by Lauren B. Schmidt. In
this paper, Schmidt investigates: 1) whether there are differences in
categorization of weakened /s/ based on the participants’ dialects, and 2)
whether sex and dialect contact influence the categorization of /s/ variants.
Using recordings from two speakers from aspirating dialects who read a list of
disyllabic nonce words, Schmidt had 20 participants from La Rioja, Argentina
(an /s/-weakening dialect) and 27 participants from Bogotá, Colombia (an
/s/-retaining dialect) complete an identification task classifying “s, f, l,
r, n, ø” as the sound in the coda or “none of the above”. The results show
that participants from aspirating La Rioja tended to classify coda [h] as ‘s’
more than participants from Bogotá, who commonly misidentified [h] as ‘f’.
Schmidt also finds that Argentine male participants misidentified [h] more
than female participants, perhaps because of their higher rate of coda
deletion, but no gender differences are found for the Bogotá participants.
Finally, dialect contact influences the results of the Bogotá participants:
those with an aspirating family member or friend attributed coda [h] to ‘s’
more than other participants.

EVALUATION

The ‘Selected Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics’
represents a valuable addition to the literature on variation within the
Spanish-speaking world. The volume unveils fresh perspectives with innovative
research, expands upon and even calls into question existing paradigms, and
advances the boundaries of Spanish Sociolinguistics. All in all, the
collection is an important read for the Hispanic linguist.

The array of papers presented within the volume spans a wide range of
geographical territory, with studies investigating variation in Spain, Mexico,
South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Such geographical breadth
provides a rich tapestry of variables arising from language contact,
isolation, lenition, and differing socioeconomic statuses, among other
important factors. In addition to diverse geographical viewpoints, a range of
methodological perspectives is included as well. While the contents are mostly
quantitative, some qualitative approaches emerge, with several studies
reflecting on identity construction through language use. The collection
contributes theoretical arguments on monolingual variation, second language
acquisition, and Creole and contact varieties, and it offers insights into
language attitudes and the perception of variation as well.

In terms of geographical distribution and methodology, then, the volume meets
its goal of bringing together scholars who analyze a single language in
different places and from different perspectives. However, a lopsidedness in
the content of the contributions is apparent as well. While studies on
morphosyntactic variation abound, those studies with a phonological focus are
few and far between. In fact, only five of the 18 contributions deal with
phonological or suprasegmental variation, and all but one of said studies are
perception- rather than production-based. I found that although the volume
does justice to the advances being made in morphosyntactic variation, it does
not as successfully reflect the strides being made in phonological research.
Of course, this small criticism is tempered by the fact that the volume’s
contents are restricted to the papers submitted for publication, but based on
the variety found in the conference program, the deficit seems odd.
Nevertheless, the morphological-phonological imbalance does not detract from
the quality of the papers included within the volume.

In sum, the ‘Selected Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Spanish
Sociolinguistics’ is an important and influential publication that would be of
interest to any Hispanic linguist, sociolinguist, or variationist. Each
chapter poses innovative and thought-provoking questions, and the contents of
this volume will shape discussions within the field of Hispanic Linguistics
for years to come.

REFERENCES

Bybee, Joan L. 2010. Language, usage, and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Colantoni, Laura & Jorge Gurlekian. 2004. Convergence and intonation:
Historical evidence from Buenos Aires Spanish. Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition 7(2). 107-119.

Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of
Sociolinguistics 12(4). 453-476.

Eckert, Penelope & S. McConnell-Ginet. 2003. Language and Gender. Cambridge:
CUP.

Evans, Bronwen G. & Paul Iverson. 2007. Plasticity in vowel perception and
production: A study of accent change in young adults. Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America 121(6). 3814-3826.

Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors.
Oxford: Blackwell.

Schwegler, Armin. 1999. Monogenesis revisited: The Spanish perspective. In
Creole genesis, attitudes and discourse, ed. by Rickford J. and S. Romaine,
235-62. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Whitney Chappell is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the
University of Texas at San Antonio. She received her doctorate from The Ohio
State University in 2013, and her research focuses on sociophonetic variation
in the Spanish-speaking world. Her recent projects include the social and
linguistic factors conditioning the glottal stop in Nicaraguan Spanish, the
pragmatics-intonation interface in Granadino Spanish, and /s/ voicing in
Ecuadorian Spanish.








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