Resumen de New considerations for variable clitic placement in Spanish

Philip P. Limerick

• The current study examines variable clitic placement (CP) in Spanish in a Mexican community in the metropolitan Atlanta area. By employing sociolinguistic interview data from 20 first-generation Mexican speakers, clitic frequencies and constraints are analyzed. Tokens of proclisis and enclisis were coded for linguistic and social factors that potentially influence clitic usage (e.g., topic persistence, specific clitic used, English proficiency, age, gender), and a logistic regression analysis was carried out using Rbrul (Daniel Johnson, 2009). Results indicate a proclisis rate of 64%, which is comparable to other varieties of Mexican Spanish. The regression analysis revealed that CP is sensitive to the particular construction used, the specific clitic, the presence of a pause, and the speaker’s gender. Additionally, English proficiency showed no effect on CP. This analysis supports previous research that CP is impermeable to contact-induced change and also reveals new conditioning factors (specific clitic, presence of a pause) that have not been examined in previous literature.