30.4225, Review: Spanish; Romance; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Orozco (2018)
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Subject: 30.4225, Review: Spanish; Romance; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Orozco (2018)
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Date: Thu, 07 Nov 2019 14:00:48
From: Natalie Operstein [natacha at ucla.edu]
Subject: Spanish in Colombia and New York City
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36531917
Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-1749.html
AUTHOR: Rafael Orozco
TITLE: Spanish in Colombia and New York City
SUBTITLE: Language contact meets dialectal convergence
SERIES TITLE: IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society 46
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018
REVIEWER: Natalie Operstein,
“Spanish in Colombia and New York City: Language Contact Meets Dialectal
Convergence” by Rafael Orozco pursues both empirical and theoretical goals.
The book’s main empirical goal is to contribute to sociolinguistic
investigation of Colombian Spanish as spoken in Colombia and the U.S. Its main
theoretical goal is to ascertain whether the linguistic and social constraints
on the selection of sociolinguistic variants are the same across different
subsets of a language community. In terms of its specific focus, the study
compares the behavior of three morphosyntactic variables – the expression of
the future, that of nominal possession, and that of personal pronoun subjects
– in (costeño) Colombian Spanish as spoken in Barranquilla, Colombia, on the
one hand, and the expatriate Colombian community residing in New York City, on
the other. The book is introduced by a preface by Gregory R. Guy, and is
apportioned into six chapters.
SUMMARY
Chapter 1, “Introduction”, sets the scene by introducing the dialect regions
of Colombian Spanish, paying particular attention to differences between the
costeño (coastal) and cachaco (interior highland) macrodialects, followed by
brief overviews of published dialectological and sociolinguistic literature on
Colombian Spanish and an outline of the salient features of NYC Spanish. The
introduction also provides a description of the linguistic corpora used, an
outline of the hypotheses and research questions, and a layout of the book.
The datasets that serve as the basis for the study consist of sociolinguistic
conversations with 25 residents of Barranquilla, Colombia whose ages ranged
between 15 and 85 at the time of the interviews, and with 20 Colombian
residents of New York City, 17 of them from Barranquilla, whose ages at the
time of the interviews varied between 16 and 78 and who differed with respect
to their age at the time of arrival in the U.S. and their English proficiency.
Chapters 2 through 4 are thematically united by their shared focus on the
structural features that condition the distribution of the variants (the
“linguistic predictors”) and their overarching finding that, notwithstanding
the consequences of language and dialect contact that obtain in New York City,
the linguistic predictors remain the same, and their effects the same or
similar, in the Barranquilla and NYC Colombian communities.
Chapter 2, “The expression of futurity”, looks at the distribution of three
ways of expressing the future: morphological future, periphrastic future, and
present indicative (exemplified in 1a through 1c, respectively).
(1a) c a n t a r é “I will sing”
(1b) v o y a c a n t a r “I am going to sing”
(1c) c a n t o “I [will] sing”
Of the three variants, periphrastic future is found to be the most, and
morphological future the least, frequent in both Barranquilla and NYC; this
result agrees with the findings reported from most other areas of the Hispanic
world (p. 30). Comparing the two corpora, morphological future and simple
present both have lower frequency, and periphrastic future higher frequency,
in NYC than in Barranquilla (p. 35). The rise in the frequency of periphrastic
future in NYC Colombian Spanish is attributed to its contact and convergence
“with the Puerto-Rican-dominated Spanish of New York City” (p. 36).
The occurrence of each future variant is found to be correlated with a number
of structural features at the clause, subject, and predicate levels. For
example, in both communities longer statements as well as negative and
interrogative statements favor the occurrence of the periphrastic future
variant, non-human subjects favor the morphological future variant, and the
presence of temporal adverbs favors the present tense variant. The linguistic
predictors are found to be the same, and their effects the same or similar, in
the two communities.
Chapter 3, “The expression of nominal possession”, looks at the distribution
of three ways of expressing nominal possession, by means of possessive
adjectives, definite articles, and periphrastic possessive constructions
(exemplified in 2a through 2d). The periphrastic construction illustrated in
(2d) is used with first and second person singular possessors and the one seen
in (2c) is used with other persons. The analytic way of expressing possession
is the most recent one historically; its emergence is attributed to the twin
impact of replacement of the second person plural possessive adjective v u e s
t r o “your (pl.)” with the analytic d e u s t e d e s “of you (pl.)” and the
need to disambiguate the multiple meanings of s u “his, her, its, their, your”
(p. 64).
(2a) s u c a s a “his house”
(2b) l a c a s a “the [his] house”
(2c) l a c a s a d e é l “his house”
(2d) l a c a s a m í a “my house”
While the construction with the definite article was used with similar
frequencies in the two communities, possessive adjectives had a lower
frequency and periphrastic possessives a higher frequency of use in NYC as
compared to Barranquilla (p. 68). The linguistic predictors were found to be
the same in both communities, and had similar though not identical effects on
the distribution of the variants. For example, it was found that the presence
of an overt referent favors the definite article variant, that location of the
possessive noun phrase in an object position promotes possessive adjectives,
and that the choice of the possessive variant is influenced by the semantic
category of the possessed noun (e.g., definite articles are favored by nouns
that name body parts [l a n a r i z “the [his] nose”] and possessive
adjectives are favored by nouns that name parents [m i p a p á “my dad”]).
Chapter 4, “Variable subject personal pronoun expression”, examines variation
in the rates of use of overt and null pronominal subjects. Although the
overall overt pronominal rate was found to be much higher in NYC (43.3%) than
in Barranquilla (34.3%) (the result attributed, at least in part, to contact
with English), the linguistic conditioning of this variable was found to be
the same in the two communities. Among other linguistic factors, the use of
overt subject pronouns was found to be favored by subjects in the singular, by
verbs in the imperfect indicative, and by a complete change in subject.
Chapter 5, “Effects of social predictors”, considers the effects of social
conditioning upon each of the three variables. Unlike linguistic predictors,
social predictors were found to exert non-uniform and in some cases opposite
effects in the two communities. Among the most interesting findings are age-
and gender-related differences in the use of the future variants, such as the
gender role reversal that has taken place in the diasporic setting: while
morphological future was found to be favored by women and disfavored by men in
Barranquilla, the opposite tendency obtained in NYC. In addition, it was found
that New York Colombian women promote periphrastic future while men disfavor
it (pp. 128-129).
Chapter 6, “Conclusions”, recapitulates the main findings and discusses their
broader implications.
EVALUATION
Although focusing on three specific structural features in two geographically
circumscribed sub-communities of a single language, “Spanish in Colombia and
New York City” has theoretical relevance that goes beyond its narrow focus,
contributing empirical data and theoretical insights to a number of current
debates in linguistics. Throughout the study, the author makes a sustained
effort to connect the changes under investigation to parallel developments and
/ or evolutionary trends in other domains of the Spanish grammar, in other
areas of the Hispanic world, in Romance languages as a whole, and
cross-linguistically.
A partial listing of the broader issues that the study engages with, touches
upon, or mentions in passing includes the impact of contact and bilingualism
on acceleration and inhibition of in-progress language change (Silva-Corvalán
1986; Enrique-Arias 2010), particularly contact-induced change in the
frequency of occurrence of morphosyntactic variants (Johanson 2002); cyclical
diachronic alternation between synthetic and analytic means of expression in
the nominal and verbal morphosyntax of Romance languages (Schwegler 1990);
preference for analytic over synthetic forms in certain types of contact
situations; evolution of Spanish from a pro-drop to a non-pro-drop language,
with parallels elsewhere in the Romance domain; the use of overt subject
pronoun rates as a diagnostic of dialectal divisions within Spanish;
grammaticalization of analytic paradigms and the dynamics of
grammaticalization in closely related languages; the competing effects of
dialect and language contact on diasporic Spanish-speaking communities; the
differing impact of different age and gender groups on linguistic retentions
and innovations; and the use of acceleration of language change in emigrant
communities to predict and anticipate linguistic change in the communities of
origin. A number of the issues addressed in the book are surveyed and
introduced through useful overviews of the pertinent literature.
This dynamic, thoughtful, and thought-provoking study will no doubt be of
interest to a broad spectrum of scholars and students of Spanish, Romance, and
general linguistics.
REFERENCES
Enrique-Arias, Andrés. 2010. On language contact as an inhibitor of language
change: the Spanish of Catalan bilinguals in Majorca. In Anne Breitbarth,
Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts and David Willis (eds), Continuity and Change
in Grammar, 97-118. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Johanson, Lars. 2002. Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework. In
Mari C. Jones and Edith Esch (eds), Language Change: The Interplay of
Internal, External and Extra-Linguistic Factors, 285-313. Berlin / New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Schwegler, Armin. 1990. Analyticity and Syntheticity: A Diachronic Perspective
with
Special Reference to Romance Languages. Berlin / New York: Mouton De Gruyter.
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 1986. Bilingualism and language change: the extension
of estar in Los Angeles Spanish. Language 62: 587-608.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Natalie Operstein is the author of ''Consonant Structure and Prevocalization''
(2010) and ''Zaniza Zapotec'' (2015) and co-editor of ''Valence Changes in
Zapotec: Synchrony, Diachrony, Typology'' (2015) and ''Language Contact and
Change in Mesoamerica and Beyond'' (2017). Her research interests center on
language change, phonology and language contact.
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