Schedule StuTS 68

The aim of this paper is twofold: to identify possible instances of variation in the distribution of quotative constructions in different geographic varieties of Spanish across spoken and written genres, and to represent this variation in a constructional network that recognizes different degrees of abstraction in the form of schemas and subschemas. In order to do so, we conducted a quantitative analysis of a corpus that represents five varieties of Spanish (Peninsular, Chilean, Argentinian, Caribbean and Mexican) and four different genres: two spoken (conversations and interviews) and two written (novels and news reports) ones.

One of the most attractive aspects of constructional models is the possibility of including any conventional feature of the meaning or form of grammatical constructions, including discourse and dialectal information. However, there is still little research on how to include dialectal variation in constructional models (cf. Östman & Trousdale 2013), particularly for constructions that specifically express discursive meanings. Moreover, it is still not agreed upon which are the parameters relevant to explain their variation, as opposed to other well-established categories to explain phonological and morphosyntactic variation.
An interesting case study to examine how to model dialectal and register variation is the quotative use of initial complementizer que ‘that’ in Spanish (1-3). From a constructional perspective, quotative que constructions have been represented as a constructional network, composed by a schema with three instantiations, depending on the material being quoted (Gras 2016): (i) previous discourse by the addressee (1), (ii) previous discourse by the speaker him/herself (2), and (iii) another speech situation (3).
(1) A: Yo no fumo
‘I don´t smoke’
B: ¿Que tú no fumas?
‘[did you say] that you don´t smoke?’
(2) A: Ven a cenar mañana
‘come for dinner tomorrow’
B: ¿Qué?
‘what?’
A: Que vengas a cenar mañana
‘[I’ve said] you should come tomorrow for dinner’
(3) Ha llamado tu madre. Que vayas a verla.
‘Your mum has called. [She said] that you should go see her’
The quotative que construction is consistent with the phenomenon of insubordination (Evans 2007), the main clause use of formally subordinate clauses. Previous literature shows that insubordination is an informal spoken phenomenon, and as such is supposed to show dialectal variation. However, there is no corpus-driven research on the degree of variation of insubordinate constructions across dialects and genres (cf. Gras & Sansiñena 2017).
The aim of this paper is twofold: to identify possible instances of variation in the distribution of quotative constructions in different regional varieties of Spanish across spoken and written genres, and to represent this variation in a constructional network. In order to do so, we conducted a quantitative analysis of a corpus that represents five varieties of Spanish (Peninsular, Chilean, Argentinian, Caribbean and Mexican) and five different genres (conversations and interviews, Twitter, novels and news reports). Preliminary results indicate that, while the three instantiations are available across all varieties under study, they are most strongly associated with the Peninsular variety (variation at the schematic level). In addition, each instantiation shows strong preferences for a particular genre (variation at the level of instantiations).

Info

Day: 2020-11-20
Start time: 15:45
Duration: 00:30
Room: Agathe Lasch
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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