Resumen

UGUETO, Marluis. “And I ate my beans”: Use of the Unstressed Possessive in Spanish of Caracas. SAPIENS [online]. 2015, vol.16, n.1, pp.77-101. ISSN 1317-5815.

In Spanish, the unstressed possessive expresses relations of kinship and possession (physical or abstract). Sometimes is related to the person who designs, creates, studies the object or with the regular user. In most cases, the relation between the possessed entity and the holder seems to be clear but it is common to find phrases in which the semantic function of the possessive is not so evident. In Venezuelan Spanish, different authors, such as Ledezma and Barrera (1985), Sedano (1988), Ledezma (1999), and others, report use of the unstressed possessive with an “emphaticaffective shade” or “emotive-affective”, characteristic of colloquial, informal and daily speech. In this study is compared the marked and not market use of unstressed possessive in nominal phrases (NPs) that designate objects or physical or psychological qualities, in order to determine factors that favor the use of unstressed possessive “expressive” in the Spanish of Caracas (2004-2012). The corpus consisted of 90 nominal phrases with unstressed possessive, from a sample of speech selected of Social-linguistic Corpus in Caracas between 2004 and 2012 (PRESEEA-Caracas). In the analysis was considered different linguistic and extra-linguistic variables such as socio-economic level. The results show that expressive use of the unstressed possessive is determined by the person, the grammatical number of the holder, the syntactic function of nominal phrases and the socio-economic low level.

Palabras clave : Unstressed Possessive; Sociolinguistic Variation; Spanish of Venezuela.

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