Subject Position in Spanish: a Study of Factor Interactions with Prototypical Verbs

• Roberto Mayoral Hernández ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Alabama at Birmingham

     University of Alabama at Birmingham

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Perspectives in the Study of Spanish Language Variation: Papers in Honor of Carmen Silva-Corvalán / coord. por Andrés Enrique Arias, Manuel J. Gutiérrez, María Alazne Landa Arevalillo, Francisco A. Ocampo, 2014, págs. 111-136
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper is primarily concerned with subject position in Spanish. While there is abundant research that deals with subject expression in Spanish, only recently there has been an increased interest in subject position. This article uses the variationist methodology to study hypotheses that relate to the language faculty, such as the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978) and the role of animacy in argument structure (Comrie 1989). The variables studied are: verb type (transitive, unaccusative, unergative), type of clause (main, completive, relative), presence of co-occurring postverbal XP (preverbal, postverbal), presence of co-occurring preverbal XP (preverbal, postverbal), and subject animacy (animate, inanimate). The program Goldvarb X was utilized to run regression analyses and the Pearson’s chi-square test was used to study relationships between factors. The results indicate that all the independent variables have significant effects on subject position except for animacy. Furthermore, the subjects of transitive verbs were shown to be predominantly inanimate.