I'm Talking tu vos: A Comparative Study of Morphosyntactic Variation and Change in the Chilean Second-person Singular

Abstract

This thesis reports a real and apparent time Variationist study of a change in progress in the second person singular (2sg) system in Chilean Spanish. In this variety, speakers manage two 2sg familiar pronominal and verbal paradigms: tu and corresponding tuteo verb forms as in (1), and vos with corresponding voseo verb forms (2), although both occur most frequently with a 0 pronoun (3). The two familiar paradigms can also mix, as seen in (4). (1) Tu tienes ahorros. You -TU have-TUTEO savings. (2) o sea vos no tenis ningun concierto. In other words you-VOS have-VOSEO no concert. (3) ..cuando tengas la posibilidad de conocer, When you-0 have-TUTEO the chance to see, tenis que ir. You-0 have-VOSEO to go. (4) ... Pero tu tenis que trabajar po. But you-TU have-VOSEO to work. (From CCSS) Traditionally described as stigmatised and restricted to lower socio-economic groups (e.g. Alonso and Lida, 1940: 54), since the 1960s voseo verb forms (often disguised by a tu or 0 pronoun) have expanded to the speech of all social classes (e.g. Morales Pettorino, 1972). Indeed, Torrejon (1986: 682) hypothesised that they might one day replace tuteo as the universal standard form of address for educated Chileans in informal situations with familiar interlocutors. Although there has been some recent Variationist work (e.g. Bishop and Michnowicz, 2010, Rivadeneira Valenzuela, 2016, Fernandez-Mallat, 2018), there is still much to be learned about the real usage of voseo in spontaneous conversation. Analysing approximately 3200 tokens from two stratified corpora of conversational Chilean Spanish recorded in the 1970s (the Habla culta ('educated speech') corpus (Rabanales and Contreras, 1979, 1990)) and 2010s (the Corpus of Conversational Santiago Spanish (CCSS) recorded by the researcher), respectively, this study explores three main themes: (i) the nature of the reported change; (ii) the relative degree of stigmatisation of the vos pronoun and voseo verb forms (e.g. Stevenson, 2007: 93); and given the rapid change, mixing of the paradigms and general lack of metalinguistic awareness about voseo (e.g. Hummel, 2010: 111-12), (iii) the extent to which speakers distinguish two separate paradigms, or conflate them into a single paradigm. As well as confirming an increasing rate of voseo in real and apparent time, multivariate analyses of social factors examine stigmatisation, while priming and subject expression results address the question of speaker awareness. Subsequent analyses, using the Variationist Comparative Method (Poplack and Tagliamonte, 2001), compare the social and linguistic constraints governing variation in the speech of speakers 35 or under versus those over 35 in the CCSS, to provide a fine-grained picture of grammatical change. Not only do rates differ, but we see weakening of constraints, with some lost entirely, and others completely reversed. Analyses of speaker effects highlight the impact of data distribution across different contexts on the observed patterns. Inspection of lexical effects reveals the key role that one highly frequent fossilised form, cachai, may have played in promoting the change. Results show that (1) the reported change is well advanced; (2) linguistic behaviour is not inconsistent with claims of stigmatisation, but effects are much more pronounced with the pronoun than the verb forms; and (3) despite a reported emphasis on pronouns and relative obliviousness to verbal morphology, speakers of Chilean Spanish are highly sensitive to the existence of two separate 2sg paradigms, which they are able to keep separate, and use adeptly for negotiating sociolinguistic meaning. Show more