Variation, evolution and the syntax of Afro-Bolivian Spanish gender agreement

Abstract

This paper combines sociolinguistic and formal syntactic approaches to characterize the constraints regulating gender agreement variation across the Determiner Phrase (DP) in Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS). Our results indicate a case of cross-generational change, consisting in the systematic replacement of stigmatized basilectal Afro-Bolivian features with more prestigious Bolivian Spanish ones. In light of recent minimalist models (Adger & Smith 2005; Adger 2006), the variability encountered in the corpus can be accounted for by reducing variation to the specification of uninterpretable features in a derivation.

Keywords

• afro-bolivian spanish
• gender
• determiner phrase
• syntactic variation
• minimalism