Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-hvd4g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-09T14:44:15.803Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cross-dialectal variation in propositional anaphora: Null objects and propositional lo in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2009

Asela Reig Alamillo
Asela Reig Alamillo
Affiliation:
LIDILEM–Université Stendhal Grenoble III
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite the interest in null direct objects in Spanish, the case of direct objects with propositional antecedents, which complement cognition and communication verbs, remains mostly uninvestigated. This article investigates, from a comparative variationist perspective, null direct objects with propositional antecedents, variably coded by the clitic lo, in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Variable rule analysis of six Spanish corpora reveals a big difference between the two dialects in the frequency of overt vs. null neuter pronoun yet shows that some of the linguistic constraints conditioning the variation are shared by both dialects (presence of a dative pronoun, type of antecedent, sentence type), suggesting that the null pronoun has the same grammatical role in both dialects. Some divergences in the conditioning of the null pronoun also emerge from the analysis and the sociodemographic information available suggests the existence of a change in progress in Mexican Spanish.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , October 2009 , pp. 381 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Ariel, Mira. (1988). Referring and accessibility. Journal of Linguistics 24:65–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ariel, Mira. (1990). Accessing noun phrase antecedents. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. (1994). Interpreting anaphoric expressions: A cognitive versus a pragmatic approach. Journal of Linguistics 30:3–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ariel, Mira. (1996). Referring expressions and the +/– coreference distinction. In Fretheim, T. & Gundel, J. K. (eds.), Reference and referent accessibility. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 13–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armary, Valérie. (1997). Vers une typologie des objets nuls en Français. Verbum 4:375–390.Google Scholar
Azorín, Dolores (ed.). (2002). El proyecto Alcore: Alicante corpus oral de Español. Alicante: Universitat d'Alacant/Departamento de Filología Española, Lingüística General y Teoría de la Literatura.Google Scholar
Bello, Andrés, & Cuervo, Rufino J. (1945). Gramática de la lengua castellana. Buenos Aires: Sopena.Google Scholar
Borthen, Kaja, Fretheim, Thorstein, & Gundel, Jeanette K. (2003). What brings a higher-order entity into focus of attention? Sentential pronouns in English and Norwegian. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 12:291–299.Google Scholar
Bosque, Ignacio, & Moreno, Juan Carlos. (1990). Las construcciones con lo y la denotación del neutro. Lingüística 2:5–50.Google Scholar
Brucart, José María. (1999). La elipsis. In Bosque, I. & Demonte, V. (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 2. Madrid: Espasa. 2787–2866.Google Scholar
Campos, Héctor. (1986). Indefinite object drop. Linguistic Inquiry 17:354–359.Google Scholar
Chambers, Jack. (1995). Sociolinguistic theory: Linguistic variation and its social significance. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Chambers, Jack. (2003). Sociolinguistic theory. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Chambers, Jack, & Peter, Trudgill. (1998). Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choi, Jinny K. (1998). Languages in contact: A morphosyntactic analysis of Paraguayan Spanish from a historical and sociolinguistic perspective. Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University.Google Scholar
Choi, Jinny K. (2000). [-Person] direct object drop: the genetic cause of a syntactic feature in Paraguayan Spanish. Hispania 83:531–543.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clements, J. Clancy. (1994). Notes on topicalization and object drop in Spanish. In Mazzola, M. (ed.), Issues in Romance Linguistics: Selected papers from LSRL XXIII. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 219–237.Google Scholar
Clements, J. Clancy. (2006). Null direct objects in Spanish. In Clements, C. & Yoon, J. (eds.), Functional approaches to Spanish syntax. New York: Palgrave. 134–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Company, Concepción. (2006). El objeto indirecto. In Company, C. (ed.), Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española, I. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autóma de México. 479–574.Google Scholar
Cornish, Francis. (2006). Compléments nuls vs pronoms objets manifestes en anglais en tant qu'anaphoriques: Syntaxe, sémantique ou pragmatique? Cahiers de Grammaire 30:89–101.Google Scholar
Cyrino, Sonia. (1997). O objeto nulo no português do Brasil. Londrina: Editoral da Universidade Estadual de Londrina.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen, & Hellman, Christina. (1995). What happens when we use an anaphor. Presentation at the XVth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics. Oslo.Google Scholar
Depiante, Marcela. (2001). On null complement anaphora in Spanish and Italian. Probus 13:193–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dryer, Matthew S. (1986). Primary objects, secondary objects, and antidative. Language 62:808–845.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Miriam, & Strube, Michael. (2000). Dialogue acts, synchronising units and anaphora resolution. Journal of Semantics 17:51–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eguía, Myriam. (2002). The social meaning of Basque Spanish null object constructions. Paper presented at 31st New Ways of Analyzing Variation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Esgueva, Manuel, & Cantarero, Margarita (eds.). (1981). El habla culta de la ciudad de Madrid. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.Google Scholar
Farkas, Donka. (2001). Specificity distinctions. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 23:85–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J. (1986). Pragmatically controlled zero anaphora. In Nikiforidiu, V., VanClay, M., Niepokuj, M., & Feder, D. (eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. 95–107.Google Scholar
Fodor, Janet D., & Sag, Ivan. (1982). Referential and quantificational indefinites. Linguistics and Philosophy 5:355–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fónagy, Ivan. (1985). J'aime. Je connais. Verbes transitifs à l'objet latent. Revue Romaine 20:3–35.Google Scholar
Fox, Barbara A. (1987). Discourse structure and anaphora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
García Velasco, Daniel, & Portero Muñoz, Carmen. (2002). Understood objects in functional grammar. Working Papers in Functional Grammar 76. Available at: home.hum.uva.nl/fg/publications_papers.html.Google Scholar
Gili y Gaya, Samuel. (1964). Curso superior de sintaxis española. Barcelona: Vox.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. (1983). Topic continuity in discourse: An introduction. In Givón, T. (ed.), Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-language study. Philadelphia: Benjamins. 1–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grevisse, Maurice. (1993). Le Bon Usage: Grammaire Française. Duculot: Louvain-la-Neuve.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette, Hedberg, Nancy, & Zacharski, Ron. (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69:274–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette, Hegarty, Michael, & Borthen, Kaja. (2003). Cognitive status, information structure, and pronominal reference to clausally introduced entities. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 12:281–299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamblin, Charles L. (1973). Questions in Montague English. Foundations of Language 10:41–53.Google Scholar
Hegarty, Michael. (2003). Semantic types of abstract entities. Lingua 113:891–927.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hellan, Lars. (1981). On semantic scope. In Heny, F. (ed.), Ambiguities in Intensional Contexts. Dordrech: Reidel. 47–81.Google Scholar
Iliescu, María. (1988). Reprise et non reprise pronominale d'un complément d'object direct à valeur neutre. International Journal of Rumanian Studies 6:69–79.Google Scholar
Ioup, Georgette. (1977). Specificity and the interpretation of quantifiers. Linguistics and Philosophy 1:233–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kany, Charles. (1945). American-Spanish syntax. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Karttunen, Lauri. (1976). Discourse referents. Syntax and Semantics 7:361–385.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1990). The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change 2:205–254.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1994). Principles of linguistic change. Volume 1: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud, & Lemoine, Kevin. (1996). Vers une grammaire des compléments zéro en français parlé. In Chuquet, J. & Frid, M. (eds.), Absence de marques et représentation de l'absence. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. 279–309.Google Scholar
Landa, Miren Alazne. (1995). Conditions on null objects in Basque Spanish and their relation to leísmo and clitic doubling. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Larjavaara, Meri. (2000). Présence ou absence de l'objet. Limite du possible en français contemporain. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica.Google Scholar
Leonetti, Manuel. (1999). El artículo. In Bosque, I. & Demonte, V. (eds.), Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española. Madrid: Espasa. 787–890.Google Scholar
Leonetti, Manuel. (2003). Specificity and object marking: The case of Spanish a. In Von Heusinger, K. & Kaiser, G. (eds.), Arbeitspapier Nr. 113. Proceedings of the Workshop “Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Specificity in Romance Languages.”; Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft: Universität Konstanz. 67–101.Google Scholar
Lope Blanch, Juan M. (ed.). (1971). El habla de la ciudad de México: Materiales para su estudio. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.Google Scholar
Lope Blanch, Juan M. (ed.). (1976). El habla popular de México: Materiales para su estudio. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.Google Scholar
Maes, Alfons. (1996). The markedness of abstract-object in discourse. In De Mulder, W. & Tasmowski, L. (eds.), Coherence and Anaphora. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 10:161–184.Google Scholar
Marcos Marín, Francisco. (1992). COREC: Corpus de Referencia de la Lengua Española Contemporánea: Corpus Oral Peninsular. Available at: www.lllf.uam.es/~fmarcos/informes/corpus/corpusix.html.Google Scholar
Masullo, Pascual J. (2003). Clitic-less definite object drop in River Plate Spanish. Paper presented at Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) XXXIII, Indiana University.Google Scholar
Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm. (1923). Grammaire des langues romanes, III. New York: Stechert.Google Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam. (2002). Formal and cultural constraints on optional objects in Bislama. Language Variation and Change 14:323–346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noailly, Michèle. (1997). Les mystères de la transitivité invisible. Langages 31:96–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ojeda, Almerindo. (1984). A note on the Spanish neuter. Linguistic Inquiry 14:171–174.Google Scholar
Otheguy, Ricardo. (1978). A semantic analysis of the difference between el/la and lo. In Suñer, M. (ed.), Contemporary studies in romance languages. Washington: Georgetown University Press. 241–257.Google Scholar
Palacios Alcaine, Azucena. (1998). Variación sintáctica en el sistema pronominal del español paraguayo: La elisión de pronombres objeto. Anuario de lingüística hispánica 14:431–454.Google Scholar
Palacios Alcaine, Azucena. (2000). El sistema pronominal del español paraguayo: Un caso de contacto de lenguas. In Calvo, J. (ed.), Teoría y práctica del contacto: El español de América en el candelero. Madrid: Iberoamericana. 123–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peterson, Philip. (1997). Fact, proposition, event. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana. (1997). The sociolinguistic dynamics of apparent convergence. In Guy, G., Baugh, J., & Schiffrin, D. (eds.), Towards a social science of language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 285–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana, & Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2001). African American English in the diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Crystal, David, Greenbaum, Sidney, Svartvik, Jan, & Leech, Geoffrey. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Reig Alamillo, Asela. (2007). Variable propositional objects in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 36, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Reig Alamillo, Asela. (2008). Cross-dialectal variability in propositional anaphora: A quantitative and pragmatic study of null objects in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Ph.D. dissertation, The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Reig Alamillo, Asela, & Schwenter, Scott A. (2007). Null objects and neuter lo: A cross-dialectal variationist analysis. In Holmquist, J., Lorenzino, A., & Sayahi, L. (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 113–121.Google Scholar
Rodríguez Alfano, Lidia. (2004). El habla de Monterrey. Base de información para estudios en Ciencias del Lenguaje. Monterrey: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. Available at: http://www.filosofia.uanl.mx/hablamty/index.html.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffman, Rebecca. (1985). Discourse constraints on “it” and “that”: A study of language use in career-counseling interviews. Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. (2006). Null objects across South America. In Face, T. L. & Klee, C. A. (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 23–36.Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A., & Silva, Gláucia. (2003). Anaphoric direct objects in spoken Brazilian Portuguese: Semantics and pragmatics. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 2:99–123.Google Scholar
Solé, Carlos, & Solé, Yolanda. (1977). Modern Spanish syntax: A study in contrast. Lexington, MA: Heath.Google Scholar
Suñer, Margarita, & Yépez, María. (1988). Null definite objects in Quiteño. Linguistic Inquiry 14:561–565.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2004). Comparative sociolinguistics. In Chambers, J., Trudgill, P., & Schilling-Estes, N. (eds.), Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. 729–763.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, & Schwenter, Scott. (2008). Constructions and pragmatics: Variable middle marking in Spanish subir(se) ‘go up’ and bajar(se) ‘go down’. Journal of Pragmatics 40:1455–1477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena, & Walker, James A. (2009). On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas: A variationist study of that. Linguistics 47:1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toscano, Mateus. (1953). El español en el Ecuador. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.Google Scholar
Yaguello, Marina. (1998). La réalisation zéro des clitiques objet dans les constructions di-transitives du français parlé. In Bilger, M., van den Eynden, K., & Gadet, F. (eds.), Analyse linguistique et approaches de l'oral: recueil d'études offert en hommage à Claire Blanche-Benveniste. Paris: Peeters. 267–274.Google Scholar
Yépez, María Victoria. (1986). Direct object clitics in Quiteño Spanish. M.A. thesis, Cornell University.Google Scholar