TheLight Subject Constraintin Spoken Spanish

• Authors: Paola Bentivoglio , Mercedes Sedano
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The purpose of this study is to explore Chafe's hypothesis (1994) that grammatical subjects obey the light subject constraint (LSC). The data consists of six half-an-hour semiformal interviews with Caracas native speakers recorded in 1987. Chafe's hypothesis is based on the claim that in any given clause one of the referents receives the unique and special status of grammatical subject. Subjects show two types of restrictions: i) from the information load perspective, they tend to code given or accessible rather than new information; and ii) from a referential viewpoint, they can have three degrees of importance: primary, secondary or trivial (1994: 88). Information load (high or low) and referential importance combined constitute the LSC: Chafe's findings prove that in English subjects tend, on the one hand, to be given or accessible and, on the other, of primary or secondary importance. Heavy subjects, on the contrary, tend to be of trivial importance. Broderick 1999 confirms the LSC's existence in a conversational English corpus. All subjects in the corpus have been coded according to information load and referential importance. The results of the analysis show that spoken Spanish also conforms to LSC.

Keywords

EN

Grammatical subject; given / accessible / new information; spoken Spanish

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2007
• Volume: 3
• Issue: -1
• Pages: 195-205

Dates

published

2007-01-01

online

2007-08-24

Contributors

author

Paola Bentivoglio

• Universidad Central de Venezuela

author

Mercedes Sedano

• Universidad Central de Venezuela

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10016-007-0013-8