Los efectos condicionantes del verbo en el uso variable de los pronombres personales de sujeto

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

El uso variable de los pronombres sujetos en el castellano puertorriqueño hablado en Luisiana y Puerto Rico

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Subject Pronoun Expression in Puerto Rican Spanish

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In Spanish, finite verbs can occur with or without an expressed subject pronoun — as in yo hablo ‘I speak’ vs. hablo ‘(I) speak’ — without altering the meaning. Drawing on sociolinguistic interviews from Puerto Rican speakers in Louisiana and Puerto Rico, I examine how grammatical and discourse constraints pattern this variation. Results reveal Caribbean-typical pronoun rates (~37%) and show that internal morphosyntactic factors, not English contact, drive pronoun use in this sample.

At a glance


Design	Sociolinguistic interviews with 20 speakers (≈2,300 tokens); analyzed with Goldvarb
Predictors	Person/number, switch-reference, tense–mood–aspect, prior-subject realization, clause type, and verb semantics
Timeline	Conducted at Louisiana State University; later informed dissertation research expanding the same variable to new samples and contexts

Key findings

Pronoun rates ≈ PR 37.8% vs. LA 37.0%.
1SG/3SG and switch-reference favor pronoun usage; plurals disfavor it.
Only location shows a clear social effect — routine English contact did not increase pronoun usage.

Subject Pronouns | Lee-Ann Vidal Covas, PhD

Los efectos condicionantes del verbo en el uso variable de los pronombres personales de sujeto

El uso variable de los pronombres sujetos en el castellano puertorriqueño hablado en Luisiana y Puerto Rico

Subject Pronoun Expression in Puerto Rican Spanish