Morphological and Syntactical Variation and Change in Latin American Spanish

The Spanish language, as it spread throughout Latin America from the earliest colonial times until the present, has evolved a number of syntactic and morphological configurations that depart from the Iberian Peninsula inheritance. One of the tasks of Spanish variational studies is to search for the routes of evolution as well as for known or possible causal factors. In some instances, archaic elements no longer in use in Spain have been retained entirely or with modification in Latin America. One example is the use of the subject pronoun vos in many Latin American Spanish varieties. In Spain vos was once used to express the second-person plural (‘you-pl’) and was later replaced by the compound form vosotros, while in Latin America vos is always used in the singular (with several different verbal paradigms), in effect replacing or coexisting with tú. Other Latin American Spanish constructions reflect regional origins of Spanish settlers, for example, Caribbean questions of the type ¿Qué tú quieres? ‘What do you (sg)want?’ or subject + infinitive constructions such as antes de yo llegar ‘before I arrived’, which show traces of Galician and Canary Island heritage. In a similar fashion, diminutive suffixes based on -ico, found in much of the Caribbean, reflect dialects of Aragon and Murcia in Spain, but in Latin America this suffix is attached only to nouns whose final consonant is -t-. Contact with indigenous, creole, or immigrant languages provides another source of variation, for example, in the Andean region of South America, where bilingual Quechua–Spanish speakers often gravitate toward Object–Verb word order, or double negation in the Dominican Republic, which bears the imprint of Haitian creole. Other probably contact-influenced features found in Latin American Spanish include doubled and non-agreeing direct object clitics, null direct objects, use of gerunds instead of conjugated verbs, double possessives, partial or truncated noun-phrase pluralization, and diminutives in -ingo. Finally, some Latin American Spanish morphological and syntactic patterns appear to result from spontaneous innovation, for example, use of present subjunctive verbs in subordinate clauses combined with present-tense verbs in main clauses, use of ser as intensifier, and variation between lo and le for direct-object clitics. At the microdialectal level, even more variation can be found, as demographic shifts, recent immigration, and isolation come into play.

Avoidance of final monopositional vowels

A group of Arabic dialects in Yemen exhibit a velar k in the subject suffixes of the perfect paradigm. The 1sg subject suffix surfaces in the various dialects as -ku, -k or -kw. In addition, the vocalization of the base may or may not be colored with a round vocalic quality, depending on both the realization of the suffix and the verbal type faʿal or fiʿil. Based on inquiries among speakers from Lower Yemen, we propose a path of evolution that leads from -ku to the labialized -kw, to a “colored” stem, and finally to the grammaticalization of coloration and loss of labialization. Two pressures propel the passage between stages: a functional pressure to distinguish between 1sg and 2msg, and a phonological pressure to avoid monopositional final vowels. The phonological pressure is shown to also motivate palatalization in the 2fsg -ki ⇒ -ky (⇒ -š), as well as the effect of pre-pausal nasal insertion, viz. -ku ⇒ -kum# and -ki ⇒ -kiŋ#. We further show that final vowels resulting from the interaction of the subject suffixes with object clitics are phonologically long—even if phonetically neutralized—and hence they do not violate the phonological requirement. The formal theories of strict CV (Lowenstamm 1996, Scheer 2004) and Element Theory (Kaye et al. 1985) are used to explain the a-synchronized development in the different verbal patterns, as well as the extent of the phonological ban on monopositional vowels.

Null Direct Object Clitics in Basque Spanish: A Study Across Four Generations

The null direct object clitic is described as one of the distinctive morphosyntactic features of Basque Spanish (e.g., compré el libro i , pero se me ha olvidado traer øi). However, no study to date has explored the variable usage of this form in cross-generational terms. The present inquiry aims to fill this void by analyzing and contrasting the results of two studies by four generations of Spanish-Basque bilinguals with the following age ranges: 85–96 (Generation 1), 55–75 (Generation 2), 35–45 (Generation 3), 18–25 (Generation 4). The education level of the participants was also taken into consideration. The first study consisted of an acceptability judgment task, in which the participants rated the acceptability of sentences with a null direct object using a 5-point Likert scale. The independent linguistic variables in this study were the semantic features [+/-definiteness] and [+/-specificity]. The acceptance rate of null direct object clitics was significantly higher among Generation 1 and 2 speakers than among those of Generation 3 and 4, with no effect of definiteness or specificity. In the second study, based on an elicitation task, older speakers (Generation 1 and 2) produced significantly more null direct object clitics than their younger counterparts (Generation 3 and 4). By contrasting the differential behavior of the participants across and within the same generation, it is shown that the generational effects observed are mainly due to the participants’ different levels of formal education.

Object clitic use and intuition in the Spanish of heritage speakers from Brazil

The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to. Results showed overextension of object clitics into contexts in which null objects were expected. Furthermore, we found higher levels of overextension among the HSs with lower patterns of heritage language use. Results are discussed along the lines of the model of heritage language acquisition and maintenance.

Historical overview

The chapter overviews the evolution from Latin pronouns to present-day object clitics. The discussion of Latin focuses on the relationship between pronominal syntax and three main factors: information packaging, verb movement, and the licensing of null objects. Then the chapter examines the earliest Romance documents (eighth–ninth century) and elaborates on the distinction between archaic and innovative early Romance languages. The former allowed interpolation, i.e. the presence of material between proclitics and the verb, while the latter exhibited adverbal clitics, which are always attached to a verbal host. The loss of enclisis/proclisis alternations in finite clauses (Tobler-Mussafia effects) marks the transition towards modern systems. Further variation across modern vernaculars results from clitic climbing, which is often lost in restructuring contexts and, to a lesser extent, in compound and simple tenses. Lastly, the chapter overviews several systematic changes affecting the order of sequences formed by two or more object clitics.

Romance Object Clitics

This book focuses on the evolution of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages. It aims to explore the empirical facets of cliticization and elaborate on the theoretical ramifications of the topic. On the empirical side, the book deals with data ranging from Latin to modern languages and less well-known dialects from all areas of Romance. Medieval vernaculars take centre stage both in the reconstruction of the evolution from Latin to Romance and in the modelling of clitic placement in the modern languages. Syntactic, phonological, and morphological aspects are examined, but the main focus is on syntactic placement, which is the hallmark of Romance clitics. On the theoretical side, the books engage with the previous literature, in particular with Generative literature. In recent decades, our understanding of Romance clitics has grown in symbiosis with the Generative theory, and the importance of most empirical findings cannot be fully appreciated without being acquainted with the terms of the ongoing debate. The book challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency. Instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which caused freezing of certain pronominal forms first and—through reanalysis—their successive incorporation into verbal hosts. This approach entails revising analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations (the so-called Tobler-Mussafia law), and addressing orthogonal phenomena such as V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting.

Introduction

This book focuses on the evolution of object clitics in the Romance languages (from now on, simply clitics). Cliticization is a major domain of research in the field of Romance linguistics. Furthermore, clitics raise many research questions that are of interest to general linguists working in any field of the discipline: phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, acquisition, pathology, etc. In fact, clitics offer clues or raise problems regarding a wealth of linguistic issues, including phonological domains, information structure, syntactic movement, and language impairments. Yet scholars are seldom aware of the many empirical facets of cliticization or have not fully considered the theoretical ramifications of the topic....

Properties of Romance object clitics

The chapter deals with the core properties of clitics and aims to build the case for a syntactic analysis of cliticization. Phonologically, the main property of clitics is that they lack stress. Stress shift and other phonological processes (e.g. apocope, aphaeresis, and elision) confirm that clitics have a deficient prosodic status, which may trigger the extension of cyclic lexical rules to the post-lexical domain formed by the clitic and its prosodic host. The morphology of clitics challenges the customary idea that clitic elements lack a complex internal structure. Syntactically, clitics differ from free pronouns in many respects: they occur in a fixed position (set on a language-specific basis), and in most languages they must be close (or attached) to a verbal form. The displacement of clitics in the clause interacts with the behaviour of other syntactic elements, noticeably the verb, negation, and other clitic material.

Clitics in imperative: proclisis, enclisis and mesoclisis in Albanian and in Italo-Romance varieties of Lausberg area

The relation between morpho-syntactic structure and its externalization into interpretive levels is the topic of this article. In many languages, typically in Romance and Albanian varieties, modal contexts, specifically imperative and infinitive, and negation, give rise to phenomena of clitic reordering and an interesting micro-variation. Imperative differs from declarative sentences in selecting enclisis except in negative contexts. Moreover, in Albanian mesoclisis appears in the 2nd plural person of imperative, between the verbal base and the person inflection. A similar distribution characterizes Calabro-Lucanian varieties spoken in Lausberg area, in contact with Arbëresh (Italo-Albanian) dialects. This article proposes to analyze the influence of modal contexts on the lexicalization of object clitics (OCls) and their different behavior in connection to their referential properties. Our descriptive and theoretical starting point is the representational morpho-syntactic approach adopted in Manzini and Savoia (2011 and subsequent works; see Section 5).

On “free” grammatical variation in a mixed lect: Clitic placement in Cypriot Greek

Variation involving a switch between pre- and post-verbal placement of pronominal object clitics in a single syntactic environment within a language is unexpected. The rationale why this would not be expected is clear: Languages pattern as either proclitic or enclitic with respect to object clitic placement, possibly allowing one or the other option across different syntactic environments. We provide an overview of our research from data collected in Cyprus, related to the development and use of pronominal object clitics for child populations and adult speakers that are bilectal in Cypriot and Standard Modern Greek. While it has been shown that the tested bilectal populations receive exposure to more than one distinct grammar, including mixed grammars with optional choices for clitic placement, an important question remains unaddressed: Is variation really “free” across all speakers or are there universally reliable predictors (such as gender, age, or level of education) that mediate a consistent use of either the standard or the dialect? Combining insights from targeted elicitation tasks administered to different groups, a corpus of spontaneous speech, and an extensive literature review, we show the weakness of such purported predictors and support a claim of free variation.