Acceso usuarios
, Cecilia Montes-Alcalá
The role of English in shaping US Spanish is widely debated. Evidence for English influence has been found in New York where greater familiarity with English correlates with changes in subject pronoun use (Otheguy & Zentella 2012). The present study further examines the impact of English by studying divergent contexts, where pronoun omission is common in Spanish, but not English, as well as convergent contexts, in which omission is common in both Spanish and English (imperatives, e.g. Ø sit down, and coordinate clauses maintaining reference, e.g. we came in and Ø sat down). Analyses of over 25,000 verbs in the speech of two generations of Latinos in New York indicate that English acts not only as a promoter of pronoun use in Spanish, but also as an inhibitor of pronoun use in contexts where both languages tend to omit pronouns.
