The Interaction of Language and Dialect Contact: Variable Expression of Spanish Subject Pronouns in Six Spanish Dialects in New York City

在纽约市(NYC)，说西班牙语的人正在经历一场非同寻常的大规模语言和方言接触。这个项目通过社会语言学研究西班牙语中带限定动词的主语人称代词(SPP)的存在和不存在之间的交替，来调查这种接触的后果。我们问，西班牙方言是否正在经历均衡化或超分化，以及/或者它们是否正在与英语趋同。Leving可能表明纽约市西班牙语的兴起，暗示着纽约市新的拉丁裔身份；超分化可能表明跨国身份的出现，这种身份更多地将移民和少数语言群体与他们的原籍社区联系在一起，而不是与移民环境中其他方言的人联系在一起。数据来自对纽约市六个最大的西班牙语社区的线人的采访。我们的举报人在纽约市居住了不同的年限，在不同的年龄到达纽约市，具有不同的英语和西班牙语熟练程度，以及不同的教育和社会经济背景。这项研究是在变异主义的社会语言学范式下进行的，并提供了一个详细的、明确的关于水平、超分化和英语接触的量化模型。我们比较了新来的拉丁裔，他们的活动大多在自己的社区内，与更成熟的拉丁裔，他们经常与其他方言群体的成员互动，在后者中，区分那些不懂英语的人和那些说得很好的人。我们研究了特定方言中的成员对具有不同特征的说话者中显性SPP出现的预测力，并询问他们在显性SPP的发生率、限制其使用的限制条件以及限制条件的强度方面有何不同。

Spanish speakers in New York City (NYC) are experiencing language and dialect contact on an unusually large scale. This project investigates the consequences of such contact through a sociolinguistic study of the alternation between presence and absence of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) with finite verbs in Spanish. We ask whether Spanish dialects are undergoing leveling or hyperdifferentiation and/or whether they are converging with English. Leveling may indicate the rise of a NYC Spanish, suggestive of a new NYC Latino identity; hyperdifferentiation may suggest the emergence of transnational identities that tie immigrants and language minorities to their distant communities of origin more than to speakers of other dialects in the immigrant setting.The data come from interviews with informants from the six largest Spanish-speaking communities in NYC. Our informants have resided in NYC for varying numbers of years, have arrived in NYC at different ages, have varied levels of English and Spanish proficiency, and diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. The study is conducted within the variationist sociolinguistic paradigm, and provides a detailed, explicit quantitative model of leveling, hyperdifferentiation, and English contact. We compare recently arrived Latinos whose activities are mostly within their own communities with more established Latinos who interact frequently with members of other dialect groups, distinguishing in the latter those who know little English from those that speak it well. We study the predictive power of membership in a particular dialect on the occurrence of overt SPPs in speakers with these different profiles, and ask how they differ in rates of overt SPPs, in the constraints that condition their use, and in the strengths of the constraints.