Papers by Adrián Rodríguez Riccelli
Spanish in Africa/Africa in Spanish Current challenges and methodologies in Afro-Hispanic linguistics, 2024
The Spanish Creoles Debate centers around the question of why–with the exception of Palenquero–on... more The Spanish Creoles Debate centers around the question of why–with the exception of Palenquero–one does not find “classical” creole languages in the Spanish Americas, whereas there are many throughout the Anglophone and Francophone Americas. Some approaches have argued that there was once a pan-American Spanish Creole that “decreolized”, but that through this process certain linguistic-structural reflexes diffused throughout the local speech-community grammar and remained as trace features in Caribbean Spanishes and Afro-Hispanic varieties. Others have countered that Afro-Hispanic varieties only underwent partial language-contact driven restructuring during the early colonial era commensurate with language-ecological conditions. Portuguese Creole languages feature prominently in many of these theories given the demographic and cultural prominence of Luso-Africans throughout the Spanish Americas in the early colonial period. In this chapter, I compile and review recent research in creolistics and history on the sociolinguistic role of Luso-Africans, ladino ‘latinized’ Africans, and criollos ‘creoles’ of African descent in the early colonial Spanish Americas. I affirm the view that the language-ecological conditions in the early colonial Spanish Americas differed substantially from those of the plantation societies of the later colonial era such that they were not conducive to largescale, system-wide language-contact driven linguistic restructuring. I argue that the prominence of Luso-African Portuguese Creole speakers was a preventative, rather than a catalyst to contact-driven restructuring, since Luso-Africans were already acculturated to Ibero-Atlantic lifeways, including linguistically, when they arrived, and they inhabited a wide range of social strata and occupations, indicating that they had ample access to local varieties of Spanish which they acquired with facility. Finally, I highlight urban Ribeira Grande de Santiago de Cabo Verde and São Tomé as important sociohistorical prototype language ecologies that exerted direct influence on the early colonial Spanish Americas and corresponded to light or partial language-contact driven restructuring: the entrepôt/center of acculturation/port-complex-node model.
Lingua, 2024
Adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish show Subject-Verb (SV)/Verb-Subject (VS) word-order vari... more Adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish show Subject-Verb (SV)/Verb-Subject (VS) word-order variation in unaccusative sentences marking sentence focus, while monolingual speakers favor VS, as in Llegó Sara ‘Sara arrived’. Yet, few empirical studies have explored the distributional rates and patterns associated with this word-order variation in perception and production among HSs. We examine the variable-rule system underlying HSs’ acceptability judgments and written-narrative production to articulate how their choices between SV and VS are constrained. We begin with an alternative argument to the Unaccusativity Hypothesis, that unaccusatives instantiating sentence focus are instances of locative inversion where the preverbal position is occupied by an explicit or silent spatiotemporal argument (stage topic) licensing VS order. The results of two context-rich, novel experiments revealed two properties that contributed to HSs’ use of VS order: an explicit stage topic and a subject longer than four words. If these were not realized, HSs became increasingly inclined towards SV order. Assuming that interpreting a silent stage topic or a short subject taxes the cognitive resources required to retrieve the relevant discourse-pragmatic information, our findings support recent acquisition theories that attribute HSs’ divergent patterns to processing costs rather than the traditional view based on cross-linguistic influence.
Estudos linguísticos e literários, 2022
This study examines the influence of 'semantic referential deficiency'-consisting of nonhuman, no... more This study examines the influence of 'semantic referential deficiency'-consisting of nonhuman, nonspecific, and indefinite reference-in variable third-person subject expression in a corpus of naturalistic Cabo-Verdean Creole discourse collected from respondents from the islands of Santiago and Maio. The methodology follows the Probabilistic Linguistics program (CLAES, 2017) in combining variationist sociolinguistics with cognitively-oriented discourse analysis, whereas the notion of semantic referential deficiency is adopted from Generative Grammar and from research on Brazilian Portuguese argument expression. The coded corpus data were submitted to a suite of descriptive and inferential statistical analyses in R (R CORE TEAM, 2021). Results show a promoting effect from nonhuman and collective referents on the selection of zero or null subjects, alongside other predictors related to referential coherence and accessibility.
In book: In Rodríguez-Riccelli, A., Sessarego, S. & J. Colomina-Almiñana (eds.) Variation and Evolution: Language Contact and Contrast across the Spanish-Speaking World, 2020
This book is a collection of original studies analyzing how different internal and external facto... more This book is a collection of original studies analyzing how different internal and external factors affect Spanish language variation and evolution across a number of (socio)linguistic scenarios. Its primary goal is to expand our understanding of how native and non-native varieties of Spanish co-exist with other languages and dialects under the influence of several linguistic and extra-linguistic forces. While some papers analyze the linguistic dynamics affecting Spanish grammars from a cross-dialectal perspective, others focus more closely on the relations established between Spanish and other languages with which it is in contact. In particular, some of these studies show how power and prestige may support (or not) the use of Spanish in different social contexts and educational realities, given that the attitudes toward this language vary greatly across the Spanish-speaking world. On the one hand, in some regions, Spanish represents the variety spoken by the majority of the population, typically related to prestige and power (Spain and Latin America). On the other hand, in other contexts, the same language is conceived as a minority variety, which may or may not be associated with stigmatized immigrant groups (i.e., in the US).
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2021
The Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC) subject domain has clitic and tonic pronouns that often amalgamate ... more The Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC) subject domain has clitic and tonic pronouns that often amalgamate in double subject pronoun constructions; the possibility of a zero-subject and the formal category underlying subject clitics are disputed (Baptista 1995, 2002; Pratas 2004). This article discusses five variable constraints that condition subject expression across three descriptive and inferential analyses of a corpus of speech collected from 33 speakers from Santiago and Maio. Double subject pronoun constructions and zero-subjects were promoted by a persistence effect, though for the former this applied across nonadjacent clauses since double subject pronoun constructions are switch reference and contrastive devices resembling the doubling of agreement suffixes by independent pronouns in languages traditionally classified as pro-drop. Zero-subjects were favored in third-person contexts as previously observed by Baptista and Bayer (2013), and when a semantically referentially deficient (Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) DP antecedent was in an Intonational Unit that was prosodically and syntactically linked to the Intonational Unit containing the target anaphor (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). Results support reclassification of CVC subject clitics as ambiguous person agreement markers (Siewierska 2004) and suggest that CVC is developing a split-paradigm for person marking and subject expression (Wratil 2009; Baptista & Bayer 2013).
Language Variation and Contact-Induced Change: Spanish across space and time, 2018
This study adopts a quantitative methodology to investigate variation between null and overt expr... more This study adopts a quantitative methodology to investigate variation between null and overt expressions of Spanish complementizer que. I focus on two varieties of Spanish from Mexico City and Los Angeles, California. This research uses a corpus linguistics–inspired methodology, relying on Twitter as a database to extract tokens and Rrbul (Johnson 2008) to perform the multivariate analysis. I extracted and analyzed 1,505 tokens and coded for 9 linguistic and 2 extra-linguistic factors. I showed the internal factors ‘verb modality’ and ‘embedded subject status’ to significantly affect the alternation, favoring the null option. Contrary to what was expected, the external factor ‘city’ did not have any significant effect on the distribution. I discuss the results in light of formal and sociolinguistic studies on the nature of subordinated constructions in Spanish (Brovetto 2002; Etxepare 1996; Subirats-Rüggeberg 1987), English (Tagliamonte & Smith 2005) and Spanish in contact with English (Silva-Corvalán 1993, 1994, 1998).
Lingua, 2018
This study provides a formal analysis of certain aspects of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS) morphosyn... more This study provides a formal analysis of certain aspects of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS) morphosyntax that are relevant to both hypotheses on the origins of the Afro-Hispanic languages of the Americas (i.e., the Decreolization Hypothesis, Granda, 1968et seq) and theoretical proposals on the nature of cross-linguistic variation (i.e., Null Subject Parameter, NSP, Rizzi, 1982). Results suggest that the grammatical features under investigation can be conceived as the by-product of advanced second language acquisition processes, and do not necessarily imply any previous (de)creolization phase for ABS. In addition, the nature of our ABS data calls into question the validity of the NSP's universal predictions. For this reason, we account for the phenomena under study by adopting a theoretical framework that revisits the traditional notion of ‘‘parameter’’ in favor of a less rigid, minimalist model (Eguren et al., 2016), in which the locus of language variation is ascribed to lexical items and their clusters of features (Borer, 1984; Chomsky, 2001).© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Thesis Chapters by Adrián Rodríguez Riccelli
University of Texas at Austin Libraries - Texas Scholar Works - Electronic Theses & Dissertations, 2019
This dissertation explores Subject Pronoun Expression (SPE) in Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC), a Portu... more This dissertation explores Subject Pronoun Expression (SPE) in Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC), a Portuguese-based language spoken in the Republic of Cabo Verde. The CVC subject domain has at least three types of nominative anaphora: a subject clitic, a null subject, and a double-subject construction. This study is the first to examine the distribution of these subject categories by combining a quantitative methodology with formal syntactic theory, as well as insights from functionalist, usage-based, cognitive linguistic, and typological approaches. In so doing, it offers a new perspective on this issue that is intended to move the field past protracted theoretical debates over the morphosyntactic status and discursive functions of these grammatical elements. For instance, the formal category underlying subject clitics has been contested in CVC and cross-linguistically; some have claimed that they are independent pronouns that cliticize at the phonological level (Déprez 1994; De Cat 2005; Costa & Pratas 2013), others have identified them as inflectional affixes in the VP layer (DeGraff 1993; Baptista 1995; Culbertson 2010), while in language typology they are analyzed as ‘person markers’ that can engage in local grammatical agreement or nonlocal anaphoric agreement (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Zribi-Hertz & Diagne 2002; Siewierska 2004; Creissels 2005; Kari 2017). Sociolinguistic interviews and picture description narratives were collected from native speakers of CVC from the islands of Santiago and Maio. Sampled speech was transcribed prosodically (Chafe 1993; Du Bois et al. 1993; Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019) in order to evaluate several aspects of discourse organization. Data were submitted to descriptive and inferential inspection in four analyses using R (R Core Team 2019): one was an exploratory test that served to delimit the variable context for SPE in CVC, the second involved a fixed-effects multinomial logistic regression, and the third and fourth were based on mixed-effects binomial logistic regressions. Results revealed highly significant effects for linguistic structural priming: double-subject and singleton tonic pronouns primed subsequent double-subjects, while null subjects primed additional null subjects. Lexical Determiner Phrase (DP) antecedents that were semantically referentially deficient (i.e. they bore inanimate, indefinite, or nonspecific reference) also promoted anaphoric zeros. These results lend partial support to the claims regarding the semantic properties of strong pronominals proposed under the Typology of Structural Deficiency (Cardinaletti & Starke 1994, 1999), and suggest that, as in Brazilian Portuguese, there is an “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint (Kato & Duarte 2003, 2005; Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) that is probabilistically active in CVC. The zero-to-zero priming effect and the favoring effect from referentially deficient lexical DPs were only active at short anaphoric distances, and were promoted when adjacent intonational units were prosodically linked or simultaneously prosodically and syntactically linked (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). The priming effect for double-subjects obtained at longer anaphoric distances; they are promoted when their antecedent is in a non-adjacent clause. Results suggest that double-subjects function as switch-reference devices, can establish contrastive focus, and reintroduce old discourse referents. These are much the same functional and discursive values that singleton tonic pronouns have cross-linguistically (Givón 1976; 2001[1984]; 2017). The realization of zero subjects is mostly contingent on antecedent accessibility (Givón 1976; 2017, Ariel 1990), but is also modulated by the aforementioned “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint. Inferring from the results for zero and double-subjects, it appears that CVC subject clitics are ‘ambiguous person agreement markers’ (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Siewierska 2004): like independent pronouns, they engage in nonlocal anaphoric agreement, but like inflectional affixes, they also engage in local grammatical agreement. This in-between morphosyntactic status is related to the infinitival origin of CVC verbs (Quint 2008b): the absence of bound person-number inflection is likely to have initiated grammaticalization on tonic pronouns, causing them to be eroded into subject clitics, and eventually become ambiguous person agreement markers, which are probabilistically dropped according to the properties of their controllers and the dynamics of antecedent accessibility. In line with Wratil’s (2011) ‘Null Subject Cycle’, it could be argued that CVC subject clitics are grammatical elements that have stagnated at an early stage of a grammaticalization cline, which entails the transformation of independent pronouns into clitics, and then eventually into bound affixes.
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Papers by Adrián Rodríguez Riccelli
Thesis Chapters by Adrián Rodríguez Riccelli