SUBJECT EXPRESSION IN A SOUTHEASTERN U.S. MEXICAN COMMUNITY by PHILIP P. LIMERICK (Under the Direction of Chad Howe) ABSTRACT This dissertation examines language contact between Spanish and English in the Southeastern U.S. by analyzing Spanish spoken in Georgia. Through an analysis of immigrant Spanish in the city of Roswell, an exurb of Atlanta, potential contact-induced language change is investigated through the lens of subject expression. While most research on Spanish has been carried out in regions such as the Southwest and Northeast, the Southeastern U.S. has not received as much scholarly attention. Therefore, the present investigation seeks to examine understudied varieties of U.S. Spanish, specifically regarding the linguistic processes at work in recent language contact situations. Latin American immigration to the Southeast has led to recent demographic shift in this region and substantial Spanish-speaking populations are emerging that historically were not part of the Southeast. The city of Roswell in particular represents this demographic shift in the Southeast, making it an ideal test site for emerging bilingual speech communities. The current study examines subject expression among 20 Mexican immigrants using sociolinguistic interview data. The speakers’ average length of residency (LOR) in the U.S. is 12 years, and their average age of arrival (AOA) is 27. Tokens of subject pronouns from the interviews were coded for language-internal (linguistic) variables previously shown to constrain subject expression (e.g. person/number, switch reference, tense-mood-aspect [TMA], morphological ambiguity, polarity, specificity) as well as language-external (social) variables (e.g. English proficiency, age, gender, LOR, AOA), and then analyzed using mixed-effects multivariate analysis in Rbrul (Johnson 2009). Results indicate an overall overt pronoun rate of 27% for Mexicans in Roswell, which is higher than what has been reported for monolingual Mexican Spanish. The multivariate analysis showed that several linguistic variables (e.g. person/number, switch reference, morphological ambiguity, polarity) and one social variable (age) played a significant role in pronoun variation. Moreover, differential effects were revealed when compared to monolingual Mexican Spanish for variables such as TMA and verb class, suggesting an influence of bilingualism. Such divergent linguistic configurations in Roswell Spanish suggest that we are seeing an emergent variety of Mexican Spanish in the U.S. with regard to subject pronoun expression. INDEX WORDS: subject expression, pronouns, Spanish in the United States, Georgia, syntactic variation, Roswell, Mexican Spanish, language contact SUBJECT EXPRESSION IN A SOUTHEASTERN U.S. MEXICAN COMMUNITY by PHILIP P. LIMERICK B.A., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2009 M.A., The University of Georgia, 2014 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2018 © 2018 Philip P. Limerick All Rights Reserved SUBJECT EXPRESSION IN A SOUTHEASTERN U.S. MEXICAN COMMUNITY by PHILIP P. LIMERICK Major Professor: Chad Howe Committee: Sarah Blackwell Margaret Quesada Electronic Version Approved: Suzanne Barbour Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2018 DEDICATION This project is dedicated to my wife, Chantell Limerick, whose continual encouragement, love, and support have kept me moving forward. I also dedicate this work to my son, Josiah Philip Limerick, who gives me inexplicable joy and so much to look forward to. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation project, as well as my graduate studies in general, would not have been possible without the support of several people. First, I would like to express gratitude to Dr. Chad Howe, my major professor, for the incredible guidance, insight, enthusiasm, encouragement, and support he has shown to me not only while carrying out this dissertation, but also during my other research endeavors and coursework. Dr. Howe has taught me to think about linguistic variation and the social forces that shape it in ways that have greatly inspired me to do the work that I now love to do. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Sarah Blackwell and Dr. Margaret Quesada, for their support, helpful suggestions, and insight in the development of my dissertation and other projects as well as their fascinating and thought- provoking courses that served as a solid foundation for my research. Additionally, I am grateful to Dr. Diana Ranson for her charisma and enthusiasm in the classroom, for her research guidance, and for teaching me to pensar lingüísticamente (think linguistically). I am also grateful for my friend and colleague, Kate Bove, who was simultaneously dissertating and is someone with whom I could commiserate as well as share accomplishments and milestones during this long writing process. I would also like to acknowledge the main sources of funding and support that facilitated both the data collection and data transcription involved in this project. The data collection was funded by the University of Georgia Graduate School Dean’s Award, and the transcription of interviews was funded by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Graduate Research Award v at the University of Georgia. Furthermore, I am indebted to both Lilian Zhu and Trevor Talmadge for their incredible assistance with data transcription. I could not have survived this journey without the immense love and support from my family; I express much gratitude to my wife Chantell for her patience and understanding and to my son Josiah for his laughs and smiles; to my mother Linda Mumau and father Patrick Limerick; to my sister Jade and brother Correy; my stepmother Teresa and stepfather Mick; my mother-in-law Christine and father-in law Rendell; my brothers-in-law Trey, Maurice, and Aaron; my sisters-in-law Rachael and Atenea; and to my nieces and nephews Lila, Abel, Judah, RosaLeah, Renzi, and Sophianna. Spending time with all of you during my breaks from writing has given me the joy, laughter, and encouragement I needed to persevere. Moreover, I could not have completed this project without all the wonderful people in the Spanish-speaking community of Roswell, Georgia, whose willingness to be interviewed and share their lives with me has not only made my project possible but extremely enjoyable and enriching. ¡Muchísimas gracias a tod@s! Finally, and most importantly, I thank my living hope, my firm foundation, the one who guards my heart and mind--Jesus Christ. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................v LIST OF TABLES ...........................................................................................................................x LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... xii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 1.1 Goals and justification for the study ..................................................................1 1.2 Research questions .............................................................................................5 1.3 Outline of this dissertation .................................................................................7 2 SPANISH IN THE UNITED STATES .......................................................................10 2.1 Historical and sociocultural background .........................................................10 2.2 Linguistic features of Spanish in the U.S.........................................................11 2.3 Spanish in the Southeastern United States .......................................................14 2.4 Summary ..........................................................................................................19 3 SPANISH SUBJECT EXPRESSION ..........................................................................22 3.1 Views of subject expression from traditional grammar ...................................22 3.2 Discourse-pragmatic approaches .....................................................................24 3.3 Variationist approaches ....................................................................................34 3.4 Linguistic variables ..........................................................................................43 3.5 Additional variables .........................................................................................55 3.6 Social variables ................................................................................................58 vii 3.7 Summary ..........................................................................................................61 4 METHODOLOGY ......................................................................................................63 4.1 Data collection .................................................................................................63 4.2 The speakers.....................................................................................................67 4.3 Circumscribing the variable context ................................................................73 4.4 Linguistic and social variables .........................................................................86 4.5 Statistical methods