Priming as a Diagnostic of Grammatical Constructions: Second-Person Singular in Chilean Spanish
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
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Languages 2021, 6(1), 1; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6010001
Received: 2 September 2020
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Revised: 14 December 2020
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Accepted: 18 December 2020
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Published: 22 December 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Revisiting Language Variation and Change: Looking at Metalinguistic Categories Through a Usage-Based Lens)
Structural priming has been described as a measure of association between constructions. Here, we apply priming as a diagnostic to assess the status of the Chilean second-person singular (2sg) voseo, which exists in variation with the more standard tuteo. Despite being the majority variant in informal interactions, Chileans are reported to have little metalinguistic awareness of voseo and they avoid the vos pronoun, in some cases using the tú pronoun with voseo verb forms, leading to proposals that tuteo and voseo are conflated into a single mixed form. The patterning for priming, however, indicates otherwise. Analyses of some 2000 2sg familiar tokens from a corpus of conversational Chilean Spanish reveal that a previous tuteo or voseo favors the repetition of that same form, indicating that speakers do treat these forms as distinct. We also observe that invariable forms with historically tuteo morphology are associated with neither voseo nor tuteo, while the invariable voseo discourse marker cachái ‘you know’ retains a weak association with voseo. Furthermore, while tuteo is favored with a tú subject pronoun, this effect does not override the priming effect, evidence that, even with a tú pronoun, voseo and tuteo are distinct constructions in speakers’ representations.
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Keywords:
structural priming; constructions; metalinguistic awareness; second-person singular; Chilean Spanish; voseo
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MDPI and ACS Style
Callaghan, M.; Travis, C.E. Priming as a Diagnostic of Grammatical Constructions: Second-Person Singular in Chilean Spanish. Languages 2021, 6, 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6010001
AMA Style
Callaghan M, Travis CE. Priming as a Diagnostic of Grammatical Constructions: Second-Person Singular in Chilean Spanish. Languages. 2021; 6(1):1. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6010001
Chicago/Turabian StyleCallaghan, Matthew, and Catherine E. Travis. 2021. "Priming as a Diagnostic of Grammatical Constructions: Second-Person Singular in Chilean Spanish" Languages 6, no. 1: 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6010001
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