Perseveration of subject expression across regional dialects of Spanish

• Published in: Spanish in context Vol. 1; no. 1; pp. 41 - 65
• Main Authors: Cameron, Richard, Flores-Ferrán, Nydia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam John Benjamins Publishing Company 2004
• Subjects: Ellipsis; Error Analysis; Language Usage; Pro drop parameter; Pronouns; Psycholinguistics; Regional Dialects; Spanish; Spanish language; Speech errors; Subject; Theoretical linguistics
• ISSN: 1571-0718; 1571-0726
• DOI: 10.1075/sic.1.1.05cam

Models of communication strictly as a function of intention and control founder when confronted by variationist findings of perseveration at different levels of linguistic structure in use. When Poplack (1981) finds that Spanish [s] leads to more [s] and that “zeros lead to zeros,” it is unclear how speaker intention is involved. But, it is clear that what a speaker says at one point will influence what this same speaker says next. Here we identify perseveration of pronominal and null subjects in three dialects of Spanish: Madrid, San Juan, and New York City. In null subject Spanish, expression of subject pronouns leads to more pronouns, and expression of null subjects leads to more nulls. We argue that a perspicuous account of perseveration may be found within Spreading-Activation Theory (Dell 1986), a psycholinguistic theory of production based on speech errors. Thus, this work integrates quantitative dialect description with psycholinguistic explanation.