Pronominal Subjects and Changes In Speech Turn In Spanish
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/1984-8412.2026.e107123Keywords:
Pronominal subjects, Speech turn, Variationist sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Mexican SpanishAbstract
A factor that is often neglected in studies on the variation of null and overt subjects in Spanish is speech turn; that is, whether the production occurs within the same speech turn or at the beginning of a new speech turn in conversational interaction. The present research aims to explore this factor using 20 speakers from a corpus of Mexican Spanish spoken in the Atlanta metropolitan area (Corpus Name [Author, Year]) to discover its potential meaning for pronoun variation, its relative importance compared to other well-established and highly predictive factors (person/number, switch reference), its intersections with other linguistic predictors and the pragmatic functions associated with the use of pronouns at the beginning of speech turns. Results indicate that speech turn is a significant predictor of pronominal variation, especially for the expression of 1st person singular and 1st first plural subjects. Its relative importance is striking, superseding the effects of morphological ambiguity and verb class, while exhibiting meaningful interactions with other predictors. The results of this study reinforce the idea that speech turn should continue to be investigated in future studies, considering the interactional nature of conversation rather than focusing only on subjects in the middle of speech turns. Potential effects of individual speakers on the dataset (the outliers) are also discussed.
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