Rafael Orozco – författare

This pioneering comparative study provides the first quantitative, large-scale, cross-language analysis of subject pronoun variation, with a dataset representing more than 1000 speakers, twenty-four communities, and 6 languages: Persian, Spanish, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, and Swabian. Over 250,000 sites of pronominal variation are analysed to reveal community-specific and universal patterns of pronoun use, providing readers with key insights into how communities vary in their characteristic rates of pronoun use and in their sensitivity to linguistic and social conditioning factors. The project employs a range of quantitative measures, statistical techniques, and visualization tools to assist readers in investigating pronominal variation from cognitive, linguistic, and social perspectives. The book includes a freely downloadable R Markdown Project for readers to use in replicating and extending the methods provided to their own projects.

This pioneering comparative study provides the first quantitative, large-scale, cross-language analysis of subject pronoun variation, with a dataset representing more than 1000 speakers, twenty-four communities, and 6 languages: Persian, Spanish, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, and Swabian. Over 250,000 sites of pronominal variation are analysed to reveal community-specific and universal patterns of pronoun use, providing readers with key insights into how communities vary in their characteristic rates of pronoun use and in their sensitivity to linguistic and social conditioning factors. The project employs a range of quantitative measures, statistical techniques, and visualization tools to assist readers in investigating pronominal variation from cognitive, linguistic, and social perspectives. The book includes a freely downloadable R Markdown Project for readers to use in replicating and extending the methods provided to their own projects.

Much recent scholarship has sought to identify the linguistic and social factors that favor the expression or omission of subject pronouns in Spanish. This volume brings together leading experts on the topic of language variation in Spanish to provide a panoramic view of research trends, develop probabilistic models of grammar, and investigate the impact of language contact on pronoun expression. The book consists of three sections. The first studies the distributional patterns and conditioning forces on subject pronoun expression in four monolingual varieties - Dominican, Colombian, Mexican, and Peninsular - and makes cross-dialectal comparisons. In the second section, experts explore Spanish in contact with English, Maya, Catalan, and Portuguese to determine the extent to which each language influences this syntactic variable. The final section examines the acquisition of variable subject pronoun expression among monolingual and bilingual children as well as adult second language learners.

The collection of fascinating articles assembled in this volume is a refreshing attempt to give renewed impetus to the study of a speech variety—Colombian Spanish—that in years past had been one of the most intensely studied in all of Latin America. Towards the end of the 20th century, that successful tradition, it seemed, had become a weighty legacy from which most Colombianistas seemed unable to free themselves. As a result, linguistic studies in Colombia became overly conventional, thereby gradually losing the opportunity to profit from more theoretically oriented trends in modern linguistics. The editors have brought together studies on Colombian Spanish that employ current theoretical approaches to linguistics, while at the same time addressing topics and varieties of Colombian Spanish that remain understudied. As regards its overall conceptualization, the editors have aimed high by including articles that either extend far beyond the national borders of Colombia or transcend the narrow(er) confines of Spanish.