33.1437, Review: Romance; General Linguistics: Morales-Front, Ferreira, Leow, Sanz (2020)

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Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2022 11:03:28
From: Miguel Garcia [tmiguel.garcia at gmail.com]
Subject: Hispanic Linguistics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1948.html

EDITOR: Alfonso  Morales-Front
EDITOR: Michael J. Ferreira
EDITOR: Ronald P. Leow
EDITOR: Cristina  Sanz
TITLE: Hispanic Linguistics
SUBTITLE: Current issues and new directions
SERIES TITLE: Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 26
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Miguel Garcia, Georgia Southern University

SUMMARY

In “Hispanic Linguistics: Current issues and new directions”, editors Alfonso
Morales-Front, Michael J. Ferreira, Ronald P. Leow, and Cristina Sanz bring
together select scholarly works presented at the 20th Hispanic Linguistic
Symposium (HLS), held at Georgetown University in October 2016. As the editors
state in the Introduction, this volume faithfully portrays the diversity of
topics, original approaches, and methodologies regularly present at HLS. By
and large, this volume provides scholars, graduate students, and interested
readers an outlook on some of the recent works in Hispanic Linguistics, while
simultaneously suggesting avenues for future research.    

The sixteen peer-reviewed articles included in the volume are divided into
three main sections: (1) Language acquisition, (2) Theoretical and descriptive
approaches, and (3) Language contact and variation. 

In the first contribution to the Language acquisition section, “The
development of intonation in L2 Spanish: A perceptual study”, Anel Brandl,
Carolina González, and Amy Bustin examine the perception of statements and
questions among Spanish speakers across several language proficiency levels.
Based on perception accuracy and reaction time results, the authors show that
beginning and intermediate learners show the lowest accuracy percentages
compared to more advanced learners. Additionally, the authors demonstrate that
wh-questions are much easier to process than yes-no questions. They argue that
beginning and intermediate learners do not fully employ intonational cues in
their perception of Spanish utterances, and that it is only at the
intermediate level where learners make some progress at the perceptual level.
Finally, the authors underscore the need to develop a theoretical framework
for the acquisition of intonation in L2 learners.   

In “Insights into the cognition of mood selection in L2 learners of Spanish”,
Joseph Collentine and Karina Collentine explore the efficiency of computer
assisted language learning (CALL) for Spanish mood-selection in relative
clauses. Analyzing data from 25 Spanish learners in an intermediate
college-level language course, Collentine and Collentine demonstrate that,
with more CALL guided practice, learners start to internalize mood selection
between the indicative and the subjunctive. Furthermore, results show that
learners using CALL progressively perform quicker as they encounter more
elaborate mood selection tasks. The authors caution, however, that it is
unclear whether learners would transfer this gained practice into more
spontaneous production.  

In “The licensing of wh-in-situ questions: Intonational evidence from
Spanish”, Carolina González and Lara Reglero explore the intonation of
wh-in-situ and yes/no questions in North Central Peninsular Spanish (Basque
Country). González and Reglero acoustically analyze production data from eight
bilingual Spanish/Basque speakers and address two main research questions: (1)
What are the intonational contours of wh-in-situ and yes/no questions in this
Spanish variety?; and, (2) Do differing levels of bilingualism have an effect
on those intonational patterns? González and Reglero show that, among these
speakers, wh-in-situ questions exhibit a final rising contour whereas yes/no
questions exhibit a final circumflex contour. Furthermore, in both types of
questions, speakers produce a high nuclear tone, which according to the
authors provides further evidence for a null intonational morpheme, common in
other languages such as French (Cheng and Rooryck, 2000). Finally, González
and Reglero demonstrate that language dominance has an effect on intonation;
Basque-dominant speakers exhibit a higher nuclear tone and larger global tonal
range (GTR) in both types of questions. The authors explain that the ongoing
analysis of the remaining participants will provide us with a more
comprehensive description of wh-in-situ and yes/no questions in this Spanish
variety. 

Claudia H. Sánchez-Gutiérrez, Nausica Marcos Miguel, and Pablo Robles García,
in “What derivational suffixes should we teach in Spanish as a Second Language
courses?”, analyze corpus data consisting of compositions written by Spanish
language learners and native Spanish speakers. In their proposal, they suggest
a list of derivational suffixes, and elaborate on why we should emphasize them
in Spanish L2 classrooms. Sánchez-Gutiérrez, Marcos Miguel, and Robles García
first provide an overview of Spanish derivational morphology, from both
descriptive and pedagogical perspectives. Based on their analysis, they
propose a list of 12 suffixes that should be reinforced in the classroom (for
example, -dad, -al, and -ario, among others). Their argument resides in the
fact that some suffixes are easily mastered by Spanish L2 learners (for
example, -ción and -ería); therefore, it is not necessary to focus on them.
The authors also suggest that the presence of lexical innovations in learners’
written texts is not necessarily tied to knowledge of how to correctly use
suffixes in different words. Finally, the authors posit that frequency plays a
pivotal role in the use of suffixes among learners—the more frequent a suffix
appears in a textbook, the more commonly used in their writing.

Abel Cruz Flores opens the Theoretical and descriptive approaches section of
the volume with “The seem-class verb paradigm and restructuring in Romance”.
Cruz Flores explores the case of Spanish parecer ‘seem’ and argues that,
contrary to what has been claimed (Gallego, 2009; Torrego, 1996; among
others), the Spanish parecer structure is indeed compatible with
clitic-climbing. In his proposal, Cruz Flores outlines conditions that favor
clitic-climbing such as negation, temporal adverbs, left dislocated elements,
and 3rd person pronouns. Cruz Flores further argues that Spanish parecer
represents a restructuring verb, and that these types of verbs are not
uncommon among Romance languages. Ultimately, the data presented by Cruz
Flores suggest that lexical verbs can also yield cases of clitic climbing, and
consequently lead to verb restructuring in Romance languages. 

In “The Progressive-to-Imperfective shift: Contextually determined variation
in Rioplatense, Iberian, and Mexican Altiplano Spanish”, Martín Fuchs, Ashwini
Deo, and María Mercedes Piñango argue that the use of the Simple Present and
the Present Progressive to refer to an event in progress is contextually
driven in Spanish. The authors test the Shared Perceptual Access Hypothesis in
three different Spanish varieties and find that the selection of the aspectual
marker is not entirely random. Specifically, speakers favor the use of the
imperfective (IMPF)-marker to refer to events in progress when the context
shared between the speakers is enriched (Rich Experiential Contexts). On the
contrary, when the contextual information is insufficient (Poor Experiential
Contexts), speakers rely heavily on the progressive (PROG)-marker. 

Previous accounts of the distinction between ser and estar have been aspectual
and gradability-based. In their “The aspectual structure of the adjective:
Spanish ser and estar”, Alfredo García Pardo and Mythili Menon provide
evidence in favor of the aspect-based account by offering a novel analysis of
this distinction. The authors base their analysis on the temporal syntax
framework (Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria, 2000) and posit that ser is used
by speakers to indicate time intervals (of events or states) whereas estar is
used to indicate a specific moment in time. Their proposal is strengthened by
the fact that it can help explain the use of ser and estar not only among
adjectives, but also in other structures such as progressives, passives, and
locatives.   

In “Mood in future-framed adverbials: Pragmatic alternations in Rioplatense
Spanish”, Mark Hoff examines the acceptability of the indicative and the
subjunctive in Spanish adverbial clauses (with cuando ‘when’) among
Rioplatense speakers. Hoff shows that the use of the indicative and the
subjunctive in this context, and in this Spanish variety, does not conform to
the grammatical rules of standard Spanish. Using the principle of epistemic
commitment (EC) (Boye, 2012), Hoff demonstrates that the indicative form is
more accepted by many speakers in this variety when future actions are
immediate and certain. Given the fact that the use of the indicative in these
contexts is not categorical (some speakers still use, and accept, the
subjunctive form) and that other linguistic factors come into play, Hoff’s
work unveils variation in a structure that was previously thought of as binary
and even random.   

Covadonga Sánchez-Alvarado closes the second section in the volume with
“Syntactic and prosodic marking of subject focus in American English and
Peninsular Spanish”. In an experimental study, Sánchez-Alvarado explores cases
of informational and contrastive focus and examines the various strategies
speakers employ to mark each type of focus. In terms of syntactic strategies,
Sánchez-Alvarado finds that overall prosodic marking in-situ is common in both
languages when conveying informational focus. However, to mark contrastive
focus, clefting is more prevalent in Peninsular Spanish than in American
English. Prosodically, Peninsular Spanish speakers were shown to employ a
wider pitch range in both types of focus. Interestingly, between the two
varieties explored, only American English speakers tend to use creaky voice
more when marking contrastive focus. 

Although Central American Spanish remains an understudied region in the field
of Hispanic Linguistics, some experimental studies do exist (Azcúnaga López,
2010; Carrasco, Hualde, and Simonet, 2012; Chappell, 2015; Chappell and
García, 2017). Franny D. Brogan’s “Demystifying Salvadoran [sθ]: Evidence for
/s/ lenition” adds to this effort by acoustically analyzing [sθ] in El
Salvador and examining the linguistic factors that favor its occurrence.
Brogan uses two measures to quantify /s/ weakening: duration and center of
gravity (COG). In terms of duration, Brogan finds that [sθ] is produced with a
longer duration than [h] but with a much shorter duration than [s]. With
regard to COG, [s] has the highest COG while [h] the lowest; [sθ] is situated
between the two. Furthermore, Brogan shows that [sθ] is predominantly found in
syllable-initial, word-medial position, a less salient prosodic position.
Framing these results within the effort-based theory of consonant lenition
(Kirchner, 2004), Brogan argues that [s], [h], and [sθ] belong on a continuum
of articulatory and perceptual salience. It is suggested that social factors
may also be affecting the occurrence of [sθ] in this Spanish variety.

In “Afro-Peruvian Spanish declarative intonation: Analysis and implications”,
Brianna Butera, Sandro Sessarego, and Rajiv Rao present us with the first
account of Afro-Peruvian Spanish (APS) intonational patterns. Framing their
analysis within the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) model (Pierrehumbert, 1980;
Ladd, 2008) and the Tones and Break Indices transcriptional system for Spanish
(Sp_ToBI) (Beckman, Díaz-Campos, McGory, and Morgan, 2002; Estebas-Vilaplana
and Prieto, 2008; Face and Prieto, 2007), Butera, Sessarego, and Rao examine
neutral declarative sentences in spontaneous speech from four elderly
monolingual APS speakers. They find that, in APS, the most preferred pitch
accent is L+(¡)H* in both prenuclear and nuclear positions. This pattern
diverges from what has been reported in other Spanish varieties, where the
intonational patterns in these two positions are distinct. Similarly, the
authors show that L is the most common boundary tone at both intermediate and
intonational phrase boundaries. According to Butera, Sessarego, and Rao, this
simplification in the observed intonational patterns of APS is a result of a
“copy and paste” strategy by L2 speakers in this contact situation and
provides evidence for an advanced stage in Second Language Acquisition (SLA)
among APS speakers.

In “Subject-predicate code-switching: Testing the need of a matrix language
through embedding”, Bryan Koronkiewicz examines intrasentential
subject-predicate code-switching (CS) and sheds light on the ongoing
discussion over the restrictions that govern it. Koronkiewicz extensively
describes the two approaches posited to account for intrasentential CS: the
Matrix Language Frame (MLF) Model (Myers-Scotton, 1993, 2002) and the
Minimalist approach (MacSwan, 1999, 2014). In essence, the distinction between
these two approaches to CS resides in the need to identify a matrix language
(i.e., a more dominant one) and an embedded language (i.e., a less dominant
one). The matrix language, for example, would determine what elements can be
subject to CS. Whereas in the MLF Model identifying the matrix language is
necessary, in the Minimalist approach it is not. Koronkiewicz tests these two
hypotheses by exploring cases of intrasentential CS, located in both matrix
and embedded clauses. The stimuli included cases of intrasentential CS with
lexical Determiner Phrases (DP) and pronominal subjects. Using an
Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT), Koronkiewicz finds that, for highly
proficient Spanish-English bilinguals, a lexical DP switch is more acceptable
than a subject pronoun switch. Interestingly, no differences in acceptability
rates were found between matrix and embedded clauses. This finding, according
to Koronkiewicz, supports the Minimalist approach since the
grammaticality/acceptability of CS was not affected by whether the switches
occurred in a matrix or an embedded clause. Finally, it was shown that
attitudes toward CS were also a factor in the acceptability ratings.
Specifically, those with a negative attitude toward CS tend to accept CS at a
lower rate than those with a positive attitude toward CS.

In “The differing behavior of loanwords in the Spanish of technology and of
fashion and beauty”, Regina Morin and Damián Robles present a corpus-based
account of loanwords related to technology and fashion. Analyzing data (around
50,000 words) from Spanish language webpages, Morin and Robles report that
overall more loanwords are found in fashion than in technological settings.
This higher incidence of loanwords in fashion contexts, according to the
authors, is due to the fact that loanwords are mostly used to advertise an
image, rather than filling a lexical gap. Furthermore, they point out that
loanwords in technology mirror lexical patterns previously described, more so
than in those found in fashion contexts. Lastly, Morin and Robles show that,
unlike fashion loanwords, technology loanwords are often accompanied by
metalinguistic commentaries, which presumably suggest negative attitudes
toward lexical innovations in the technology industry.

In “Futurity and probability in Spanish as a heritage language”, Diego Pascual
y Cabo and Gema Vela explore future tense morphology (FTM) among heritage
speakers (HS). Specifically, the authors examine the uses of futurity and
probability/epistemicity, expressed by FTM, from acceptability and production
data of 39 Spanish HS and five monolingual Spanish speakers (the control
group). Regarding acceptability judgements, both groups exhibit high ratings
for the felicitous conditions in futurity and probability contexts. In the
infelicitous conditions, both groups reject contexts of futurity, but
interestingly only monolingual speakers do so in probability contexts. In the
production data, heritage speakers favor the use of periphrastic future (PF)
to express futurity, whereas monolingual speakers show a balanced use between
FTM and PF. When asked to convey probability, monolingual speakers employ FTM
at a higher rate than HS; HS utilize an array of strategies to express
probability (similar to English). According to Pascual y Cabo and Vela, these
results provide evidence for a convergent simplification of FTM among heritage
speakers, whose Spanish, and the strategies used to express probability,
resemble English.

Rebecca Ronquest, Jim Michnowicz, Eric Wilbanks, and Claudia Cortés explore
the Spanish spoken by immigrants and heritage speakers in central North
Carolina. In “Examining the (mini-) variable swarm in the Spanish of the
Southeast”, the authors investigate an array of linguistic variables (i.e.,
“variable swarm”) in order to comprehensively describe the linguistic patterns
found in this understudied region. Specifically, they base their analysis on
(1) lenition of /b, d, g/; (2) acoustic vowel space; (3) rhythm; and (4)
discourse markers. Individually analyzed, the authors find that, with the
exception of the occurrence of discourse markers, immigrants and heritage
speakers behave similarly regarding lenition of /b, d, g/, vowel space, and
rhythm. When interpreted holistically, however, results suggest that heritage
speakers from this region are in the initial stage of the formation of a
contact-induced variety, when compared to other regions such as New York City
and Los Angeles. According to the authors, analyzing a “variable swarm” can
provide us with a more nuanced way to examine language contact processes and
ultimately allow us to trace different stages of dialectal formation. 

With “Casting light on the Spanish creole debate: A legal perspective”, Sandro
Sessarego ends the Language contact and variation section, and puts forward
the Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (LHCG) to address the Spanish creole
debate. This debate centers on the rarity of Spanish creoles found in the
Americas, where only two creoles are spoken (i.e., Palenquero and Papiamentu).
Following this hypothesis, Sessarego suggests that the Spanish slavery system,
unlike that of other colonial powers, provided slaves with “legal personality”
(i.e., legal rights), which in turn helped to shape the language context and
development of Afro-Hispanic varieties in the Americas. To test LHCG,
Sessarego examines Chocó Spanish (CS), spoken in a remote region in Colombia.
Based on historical and legal evidence, Sessarego argues that both the “legal
personality” status and socioeconomic factors, especially in remote areas such
as Colombian Chocó, did play a role in the evolution of the Spanish spoken in
this region.  

EVALUATION

“Hispanic Linguistics: Current issues and new directions” contains three main
thematic sections, but these themes are addressed from a wide range of
linguistic areas, including morphology, phonetics, phonology, pragmatics, and
syntax. The volume offers both qualitative and quantitative approaches, which
further helps to achieve the editors’ goal of presenting a diverse glimpse
into the field of Hispanic Linguistics. Collectively, the articles presented
in this volume can, and will, stand as an insightful and resourceful guide for
scholars as well as for students in graduate and advanced undergraduate
courses in Hispanic Linguistics.

In terms of organization, each section in the volume is named appropriately.
The editors successfully place the articles according to the corresponding
topic; the articles are also evenly distributed across the sections. In the
Introduction, the editors explain that this volume is intended to highlight
the diversity and high quality of research presented at venues such as HLS,
and they help to contextualize the volume for their readers. One criticism,
however, revolves around the description of each article in the Introduction.
For each contribution, the information included in the abstract appears almost
verbatim in the Introduction. This can be problematic because the information
included in the Introduction appears redundant for the reader and its
extensiveness may hinder accessibility to the text. Additionally, the editors
do not seem to display any sort of connection between each contribution (other
than the title of the section). Instead, it may have been more informative to
learn about the selection process of these articles, or about the actual
conference (e.g., number of presentations and poster sessions) and how it
prompted the edited volume. Moreover, there are a handful of typographical and
formatting errors throughout the volume; in most cases, however, these do not
interfere with the content of the articles.              

In addition to the breadth of topics covered, the articles treat Spanish
varieties from a wide range of geographical areas. The volume includes studies
on well-represented varieties such as Mexican (Altiplano), Peninsular, and
Rioplatense Spanish, as well as on less-studied ones such as Afro-Peruvian
Spanish, Salvadoran Spanish, and Spanish in the southeastern region of the
United States. The reader can also find investigations of monolingual,
bilingual, and Spanish heritage speakers. The volume effectively shows the
diversity of research being done in Hispanic Linguistics. More broadly, the
contributions included in this volume do justice to its title. “Hispanic
Linguistics: Current issues and new directions” incorporates original
proposals, new approaches, innovative methodologies, and novel hypotheses,
which overall represent, and push forward, the current wave in the field of
Hispanic Linguistics.  

Despite the criticisms mentioned above, this volume constitutes a valuable
addition to the field. The articles offer informed answers to the research
questions proposed and, perhaps more importantly, they pose paths for further
research. For the novice or experienced scholar, it will be a springboard that
fosters renewed dialogue and new investigations in coming years.

REFERENCES

Azcúnaga López, Raúl E. 2010. Fonética del español salvadoreño. In El español
hablado en América Central: Nivel fonético, ed. by Quesada Pacheco M. A.,
83-113. Madrid: Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert.

Beckman, Mary, Manuel Díaz-Campos, Julia T. McGory and Terrell A. Morgan.
2002. Intonation across Spanish in the Tones and Break Indices framework.
Probus 14. 9-36.

Boye, Kasper. 2012. Epistemic meaning: A crosslinguistic and
functional-cognitive study. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Carrasco, Patricio, José I. Hualde and Miquel Simonet. 2012. Dialectal
differences in Spanish voiced obstruent allophony: Costa Rican vs. Iberian
Spanish. Phonetica 69. 149-179.

Chappell, Whitney. 2015. Linguistic factors conditioning glottal constriction
in Nicaraguan Spanish. Italian Journal of Linguistics 27(2). 1-42.

Chappell, Whitney and Christina García. 2017. Variable production and
indexical social meaning: On the potential physiological origin of
intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and
Lusophone Linguistics 10(1). 1-37.

Cheng, Lai-Shen L. and Johan Rooryck. 2000. Licensing Wh-in-situ. Syntax 3(1).
1-19.

Demirdache, Hamida and Myriam Uribe-Etxebarría. 2000. The primitives of
temporal relations. In Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of
Howard Lasnik, ed. by Martin R., D. Michaels & J. Uriagereka, 157-186.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Estebas-Vilaplana, Eva and Pilar Prieto. 2008. La notación prosódica del
español: Una revisión de Sp_ToBI. Estudios de Fonética Experimental XVII.
263-283.   

Face, Timothy and Pilar Prieto. 2007. Rising Accents in Castilian Spanish: A
Revision of Sp_ToBI. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 7. 117-146.

Gallego, Ángel. 2009. Defective C-T in Romance. Probus 21(2). 163-216.

Kirchner, Robert. 2004. Consonant lenition. In Phonetically based phonology,
ed. by Hayes B., R. Kirchner & D. Steriade, 313-345. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Ladd, D. Robert. 2008. Intonational phonology (2nd edition). Cambridge: CUP.

MacSwan, Jeff. 1999. A minimalist approach to intrasentential code switching.
New York, NY: Garland.

MacSwan, Jeff. 2014. Programs and proposals in codeswitching research:
Unconstraining theories of bilingual language mixing. In Grammatical theory
and bilingual codeswitching, ed. by MacSwan J., 1-33. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.  

Myers-Scotton, Carol. 1993. Social motivations for codeswitching: Evidence
from Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Myers-Scotton, Carol. 2002. Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and
grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Pierrehumbert, Janet. B. 1980. The Phonology and Phonetics of English
Intonation (Doctoral Dissertation). Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Torrego, Esther. 1996. Experiencers and raising verbs. In Current issues in
comparative grammar, ed. by Freiding R., 101-120. Boston, MA: Kluwer.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Miguel García is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Georgia Southern
University. Dr. García completed his Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from The
Ohio State University in 2016. His research focuses on phonetics and
phonology, with a particular interest in prosody and language contact. His
recent work includes the intonational patterns of Peruvian Amazonian Spanish
(PAS), vowel length in PAS, and discourse analysis of non-standard structures
in Peruvian Spanish.





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