The Subjunctive in New Mexican Spanish: Maintenance in the Face of Language Contact
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Lacasse, Dora Lee
- Graduate Program:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 10, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Rena Torres Cacoullos, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Rena Torres Cacoullos, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Paola Eulalia Dussias, Committee Member
Karen Lynn Miller, Committee Member
Michael Travis Putnam, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Language contact
sociolinguistics
subjunctive
New Mexican Spanish
bilingual
linguistic variation - Abstract:
- This dissertation tests proposals of accelerated simplification of the subjunctive in varieties of Spanish as a result of contact with English, through an assessment of variable subjunctive expression in complement clauses in New Mexican Spanish, a dialect that has been in contact with English for over 150 years. Data come from the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual corpus ([NMSEB] Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2018), comprised of sociolinguistic interviews from highly bilingual members of the New Mexican Hispano community who engage in code-switching. A monolingual benchmark from the Corpus Sociolingüístico de la Ciudad de México ([CSCM] Martín Butragueño & Lastra, 2011-2015) is established, in order to measure any changes in the contact variety. The extraction protocol for both corpora adheres to the principle of accountability (Labov 1972) in defining the variable context: all complement clauses under a main verb (governor) that appeared at least once with a complement clause in the subjunctive. Whereas overall subjunctive rate is a spurious criterion, quantitative co-occurrence patterns provide replicable indices of simplification versus productivity. A series of type and relative frequency measures in conjunction with subjunctive rates according to the governor reveal no discernable difference in lexical routinization between the bilingual variety and monolingual benchmark. In both, subjunctive selection is largely determined by the lexical identity of the governing verb, just as in other Romance languages (Poplack et al 2013, 2018). Furthermore, structural/semantic measures applied to both corpora reveal that factors conditioning subjunctive use in the monolingual benchmark—matrix polarity, matrix sentence type and governor tense-aspect-mood—also condition subjunctive selection in NMSEB. The bilingual nature of the NMSEB corpus allows for a direct evaluation of English’s role in subjunctive selection. While English complements do occur under a few subjunctive-selecting governors, they do not function as a way for speakers to avoid the subjunctive, accounting for very little of the data overall. In fact, the speakers' English use has resulted in the extension of the subjunctive to new contexts, as Spanish subjunctive occurs under English main-clause verbs (for example, wish and hope). Contrary to the hypothesis of contact-induced simplification, neither presence of English in the target main + complement clause nor in the wider local discourse affect subjunctive rates. Moreover, socio-linguistic measures of language preference, relative self-ratings of the speaker's two languages, and language predominance in the transcripts—global measures of degree of contact—also show no effect on subjunctive use, as is also the case with speaker age, social class, and place of residence. Both the linguistic and extralinguistic patterns reveal the lack of contact-induced change--simplificatory or otherwise--in the mood system of New Mexican Spanish.