Orality and overtness : effects on Spanish subject use

Abstract

This study of a corpus of varieties of Spanish finds that the level of orality of a text is a strong predictor of subject pronoun expression. Following previous studies’ application of orality to interrogative constructions in Brazilian Portuguese and French, an orality measurement was adapted for Spanish and applied to the new corpus Corpus Diacrónico del Español Latinoamericano: Edición de Sujetos (CorDELES). CorDELES was created to investigate the historic development of subject pronoun expression that led to the high rates of overt subject pronouns attested in current varieties of Latin American Spanish, specifically whether overt subject pronoun expression increases following contact with the enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean during the colonial period. This contact hypothesis was used as a backdrop to investigate the effects of orality on a corpus. Indeed, the inclusion of orality as a predictor in a mixed-effects model found significant effects for a distinction between Spain and the Americas as well as an intriguing interaction between year and orality. These results add to the burgeoning body of work revealing the benefits of accounting for orality in corpus work.