This volume in the “Oxford studies in sociolinguistics” series explores in depth how interlinguistic and interdialectal influences have shaped the use of Spanish subject personal pronouns in New York. Taking a variationist approach and grounded in quantitative analysis of more than 60,000 verb tokens generated from 140 sociolinguistic interviews, the book faithfully depicts the immigrant bilingual scenario of the city.
The volume consists of ten chapters and a concluding essay. Ch. 1 offers background information about the Latino population in New York and their variable use of Spanish subject pronouns. Important concepts are introduced, and a literature review on linguistic contact and dialectal leveling is provided. Ch. 2 explains in detail how interviews were conducted and transribed. Ch. 3 deals with the criteria for eligible verbs. When complications arise and some verb types do not fit in with the envelope of variation, the authors make decisions with respect to context types according to the coding manual provided in Appendix 2. Ch. 4 reveals that groups categorized by regional origin differ in terms of occurrence rates of subject pronouns. Demographic groups based on age, gender, or education do not differ significantly in pronoun rate among Caribbeans, while among Mainlanders the pronoun rate varies considerably between members of different demographic groups. Ch. 5 looks into the influence of contact with English in shaping the use of Spanish in New York. It is found through a deductive-predictive method that speakers of bilingual lects, second-generation speakers, and those with greater English proficiency and exposure use more subject pronouns. Ch. 6 deals with another shaping force that is referred to as dialectal leveling. Unlike the strong and rising influence of English, cross-regional dialectal convergence is found to work in a more nuanced and selective way. Regional differences are smaller among speakers with an out-group orientation than among those with an inward orientation. In Ch. 7, a multivariate regression analysis is carried out to investigate the strength of influence on pronoun rate by different grouping categories. Regional differences are ranked highest, which indicates the strong continuity between reference and bilingual lects. English is ranked higher than orientation, which reflects that language contact is exerting stronger influence than dialectal leveling. Chs. 8 and 9 shift from the external social factors to the internal grammatical and discourse-communicative factors, providing internal evidence of contact and leveling respectively. Ch. 10 takes a further step to challenge the assumptions of incomplete acquisition and limited proficiency. The main body of the volume ends with a concluding essay summing up the main points of the book. The two appendices provide the questionnaire used in the interviews and the coding manual that undergirds the corpus, which are fairly valuable for researchers who intend to conduct similar studies in other contexts.
This book will be an excellent reference to those interested in bilingualism, sociolinguistics, and immigration. It will certainly deserve a place in the libraries of teaching and research institutions that value the study of language in society.
