A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF PRONOMINAL EXPRESSION IN CALI
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2024
Abstract
This sociolinguistic investigation analyzes variable subject pronoun expression in the PRESEEA-Cali corpus, which is socially stratified in terms of speaker’s gender, age and educational level. We explored 6409 tokens seeking to determine the effects of six predictors: 3 internal and 3 external. Results uncover the highest pronominal rate (28,6%) found to date in a continental Andean highland speech community. The linguistic conditioning shows the strongest effect of grammatical person and number of the subject; specifically, uno is the pronoun that most strongly favors overt subjects. The social conditioning reveals a strong effect of speaker’s age with the youngest speakers disfavoring overt pronominal subjects. This finding appears to have cognitive implications, as the youngest speakers would be expected to have the highest pronominal rates according to sociolinguistic theory. Moreover, women promote overt pronominal subjects, something similar to what happens in the Colombian Caribbean region, but the opposite of what occurs in the Andean city of Medellin. In general terms, this study contributes to expand our knowledge of subject pronoun expression in continental Latin-American speech communities. Furthermore, our findings regarding speaker’s age contribute to opening promising research paths.
Publication Source (Journal or Book title)
Linguistica
Recommended Citation
Orozco, R., Marmolejo, M., & Grajales, R. (2024). A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF PRONOMINAL EXPRESSION IN CALI. Linguistica, 40 (1) https://doi.org/10.5935/2079-312X.20240006
