It presents a painstakingly rigorous and ultimately fascinating account of the effects of contact with English on New York City Spanish. Equally importantly, it addresses the effects of contact with other varieties of Spanish.
Kim Potowski, Journal of Sociolinguistics
Spanish in New York is a groundbreaking sociolinguistic analysis of immigrant bilingualism in a U.S. setting. Drawing on one of the largest corpora of spoken Spanish ever assembled for a single city, Otheguy and Zentella demonstrate the extent to which the language of Latinos in New York City represents a continuation of structural variation as it is found in Latin America, as well as the extent to which Spanish has evolved in New York City. Their study, which focuses on language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity, carefully distinguishes between the influence of English and the mutual influences of forms of Spanish with roots in different parts of Latin America.
Taking variationist sociolinguistics as its guiding paradigm, the book compares the Spanish of New Yorkers born in Latin America with that of those born in New York City. Findings are grounded in a comparative analysis of 140 sociolinguistic interviews of speakers with origins in Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Puerto Rico. Quantitative analysis (correlations, anovas, variable hierarchies, constraint hierarchies) reveals the effect on the use of subject personal pronouns of the speaker's gender, immigrant generation, years spent in New York, and amount of exposure to English and to varieties of Spanish. In addition to these speaker factors, structural and communicative variables, including the person and tense of the verb and its referential status, have a significant impact on pronominal usage in New York City.
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Spanish in New York is a groundbreaking sociolinguistic analysis of immigrant bilingualism in a U.S. setting. Drawing on one of the largest corpora of spoken Spanish ever assembled for a single city, Otheguy and Zentella demonstrate the extent to which the language of Latinos in New York City represents a continuation of structural variation as it is found in Latin America.
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Preface ; 1. Continuity, language contact, and dialectal leveling in Spanish in NYC ; 2. Interviews and transcripts ; 3. The envelope of variation and the formation of the corpus ; 4. The pronoun rate: Delineating New York Latino communities ; 5. Language contact: Generation, exposure, and English ability groups ; 6. Dialectal leveling in Spanish in New York ; 7. A multivariate approach to continuity, contact, and leveling ; 8. Internal evidence for continuity and contact ; 9. Internal evidence for continuity and leveling ; 10. The grammar of bilinguals in New York ; Concluding remarks Spanish in New York: Aqui se habla espanol ; Bibliography ; Appendix 1 - Questionnaire ; Appendix 2 - Coding Manual
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Product details
ISBN
9780199737406
Published
2012
Publisher
Oxford University Press Inc
Weight
567 gr
Height
163 mm
Width
236 mm
Thickness
28 mm
Age
P, 06
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Number of pages
320