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Functional Compensation for /s/ Deletion in Puerto Rican Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Judith G. Hochberg
Judith G. Hochberg*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

The role of functional processes in language is examined in the context of an empirical study of /s/ deletion in Puerto Rican Spanish. Deletion of /s/ from 2sg. verb forms is shown to result in exceptionally high use of subject pronouns, especially with those verb forms rendered ambiguous by /s/ deletion. These findings are shown to fit in with a general tendency in Puerto Rican Spanish to use pronouns functionally as well as stylistically.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 1986, pp. 609 - 621
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This work was supported in part by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant no. 1-R01-HD18908. I am indebted to George N. Clements, John R. Rickford, and Elizabeth Traugott for invaluable assistance. I would also like to give thanks to Peter Austin, Paola Bentivoglio, Henrietta Cedergren, Eve V. Clark, Charles Ferguson, Gregory Guy, Jeffrey Heath, Paul Kiparsky, Tony Kroch, William Labov, Barbara Lafford, Amparo Morales, Shana Poplack, Kurt Queller, Carmen Silva-Corvalán, and Tracy Terrell for many helpful comments and suggestions; to Catherine Snow and Ewert Thomas for help with statistics; and to Magali Rivera, the administrations of La Casa del Sol and the Cardinal Cushing School in Boston—and especially my ten native speakers—for their essential role in this work. An earlier version was presented as Hochberg 1983.

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