Establishing a Variable Context for Lexical Subjects in Spanish

Abstract

The dominant trend in variationist studies of Spanish subject expression is to focus on pronominal subjects, excluding lexical subjects (LSs). Due to such lack of attention to LSs in previous research, the current paper aims to fill this gap and to gain a better understanding of variation between LSs and subject pronouns (SPs). While previous research that analyzes LSs makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on subjects and enriches our understanding of the functions of LSs, a variable context for LSs in the variationist tradition has not heretofore been established. The current paper proposes a variable context methodology for LSs by investigating cases where LSs are produced (e.g. mi mamá trabaja ‘my mom works’), particularly in contexts in which SPs (overt or null) could have alternatively been produced (e.g. ella/∅ trabaja ‘she works’). Overall frequencies, constraints, and pragmatic functions of LSs are discussed.

Keywords

• lexical subjects
• pragmatics
• subject expression
• syntactic variation
• variable context