Markedness reversal of discourse functions in Puerto Rican Spanish

Barbara Avila-Jimenez

Sun. 9-10:40 A

A vast amount of quantitative and qualitative research has been performed on discourse functions and their relationship to pronominal expression in languages with null and overt pronouns. The results of these analyses have shown that the use of these syntactic variants greatly respond to discourse conditioning.

Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) shows a near-grammaticalization of overt subject pronouns. The following questions therefore arises: how does this increase in use affect discourse functions conveyed through overt pronouns? I analyzed the speech of 30 PRS speakers ranging in age from 13 to 84 years (18 women 12 men) and from different socio-economic background. The following discourse functions of overt subject pronouns were identified in the corpus: contrast, corroborative use, exhaustive listing, emphasis, iconicity and discourse connectedness.

The PRS corpus revealed that speakers' use of pronominals followed discourse motivations found in other dialects of Spanish, for example Venezuelan Spanish, Mexican-American Spanish, Madrid Spanish, and also in languages such as Brazilian Portuguese, Egyptian Arabic, and Japanese. However, the dialogue situation in which the data was gathered affected the selection of null-overt subject pronouns by PRS speakers. There was an iconic effect on the use of null/overt pronouns between the interviewer and interviewee or the participants in a group interview.

There was no indication that PRS speakers are conveying marked discourse functions in other new ways. This finding directly contradicts suggestions made recently by several scholars. Nevertheless, this attested increase in overt pronominal use has permeated into contexts in which no specific discourse-pragmatic motivation accounts for their use. Therefore, the near-grammaticalization of pronominal overtness in PRS has triggered a reversal of markedness. Overt pronouns are shifting from denoting a narrower and specific function to denoting presence, absence, or unimportance of a function, that is, unmarked case.