Resumo

MARTINEZ LARA, José Alejandro. A Quantitative Study of the Variable Third Person Subject in Current Spoken Spanish of Caracas. Núcleo [online]. 2013, vol.25, n.30, pp.69-96. ISSN 0798-9784.

In Spanish, as in Italian, Portuguese, Galician, and other Romance languages, it is possible for the grammatical subject to be explicit or implicit, phenomenon known as the variable expression of the subject. Based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of variationist sociolinguistics, my aim in this research is to describe the alternation between the presence and absence of the 3rd. person subject, singular and plural, in the Spanish spoken in Caracas, so as to determine which linguistic and extralinguistic factors encourage the speakers to explicitly mention the subject, which, according to the characteristics of Spanish, could be omitted. For this, I analyzed a sample of 36 oral interviews, taken from the Corpus Preseea-Caracas 2004-2010; I based the analysis on five linguistic variables -grammatical number, ambiguity, discursive connectivity, verb typology, and turn in conversation- and two extralinguistic variables -sex and age of speakers. All the cases were subjected to a descriptive and an inferential analysis, the latter carried out through the program GoldVarb X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte and Smith, 2005). The results show that only the linguistic variables were significant, which indicates that this phenomenon is conditioned by internal factors of the language.

Palavras-chave : grammatical subject; sociolinguistics; spoken Spanish of Caracas.

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