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.