Book Description

The present dissertation analyzes first- and second-person singular subject pronoun expression in Dominican Spanish in adult-to-adult, caregiver, and child speech. Overall, despite the high rates of subject pronoun expression seen in this variety, the conditioning factors that govern subject pronoun expression in all dialects are found to be operative in Dominican Spanish. In addition, children were found to have acquired several of the constraints that govern first- and second-person singular subject pronoun expression in adult-to-adult speech. However, caregivers pronoun expression was shown to not be constrained by certain factors while others showed different patterns in comparison to adult-to-adult speech.First, adult-to-adult Dominican Spanish displays many of the same constraints on subject pronoun expression found in other varieties. However, the well-known effect of verb class operates differently in this variety. Nevertheless, when analyzing the most frequent verbs found in each category, several verb-particular constructions showing distinct patterns are revealed. Additionally, turn position in first-person singular pronoun expression shows more broad effects than what has been found for other varieties such that it is operative with all verb classes. Moreover, certain factors found to condition first-person singular pronoun expression do not extend to second-person singular pronoun expression, which suggests that pronouns of different grammatical person/number pattern in distinct ways. Nevertheless, Dominican Spanish does show slight differences in how and in which contexts certain conditioning factors operate, which are thought to be more revealing in determining dialectal differences than overall rates.With respect to child speech, the children showed to have already acquired many of the adult-like factors that constrain pronoun use in adult-to-adult speech. However, the well-known switch referent constraint was found to be inoperative in first-person singular pronoun expression in child speech. Despite this, a second measure of switch reference, that of intervening human subjects, did contribute to childrens first-person singular pronoun expression. Thus, the data presented here suggest this well-known constraint is acquired on the basis of the presence or absence of intervening human subjects between coreferential mentions. Outside of the result for switch reference, children showed to closely follow the patterns seen in caregivers, showing they are sensitive to the frequency and distributional patterns found in their input. Similarly, children produced adult-like usage patterns with certain lexically-specific constructions found in their input, demonstrating that these community-based items are an important locus of childrens acquisition of the dialect to which they are exposed.Finally, caregivers showed some differences with respect to which constraints are operative in their use of first-person singular subject pronouns in comparison to adult-to-adult speech. In particular, the constraint of turn position, while operative in adult-to-adult speech, does not significantly constrain caregivers first-person singular subject pronoun expression. Further analysis revealed this is due to the nature of child-caregiver interaction such that caregivers frequently refer to their children in order to hand the floor over to them and develop subsequent discourse. In fact, caregivers use of second person singular forms in child-caregiver interaction greatly exceeded their use of the same forms in their adult-to-adult interactions. This, together with their infrequent use of first-person singular forms, impedes a turn-position effect from emerging. Caregivers also showed to favor second-person singular pronoun expression with Wh-questions in the speech to their children, which differs from the pattern found in adult-to-adult speech with these same elements. Overall, the results show that caregivers adjust certain aspects of their speech when interacting with their children while at the same time they provide adult-like usage patterns for certain community-based lexically-specific constructions.