SYNTACTIC VARIATION: THE CASE OF COPULA CHOICE IN LIMÓN, COSTA RICA Jorge Aguilar-Sánchez Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of TESOL and Applied Linguistics and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of the College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University November 2009 iii © 2009 Jorge Aguilar-Sánchez ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iv Les dedico esta disertación a mis padres y a toda mi familia por todo el apoyo y amor incondicional brindado durante estos nueve años and to my partner Dan and my other family, the McNeelys, for their support and unconditional love during this process. ¡Los amo a todos! I love you all! Llelli y Papá por fin se les cumplió la predicción, ahora tenemos doctores, masters, licienciados, ingenieros y demás en nuestra familia. A mis abuelas Pacífica y Ninfa que no me pudieron ver alcanzar este sueño en vida, pero que sé que siempre conté con su apoyo. Las amo mucho! Jorge v Acknowledgements At this time I would like to thank all the people who helped me during the stages of this dissertation. First of all, I would like to thank Ivannia, la prima, for all her help and support during the data collection stages and beyond. Cito and Ige for sharing their home with me to be able to work on this project and Doña Mireya, Gino, and Soley as well for allowing me to share part of my life with them. The many members of my nuclear family for putting up with my stress moods while visiting them, I love you all. I would like to thank Eli Winkler for her support over the years and for making part of the data collection for this dissertation possible. Special thanks go to the people of Limón for being so close to my heart and for always being willing to help me with my research projects. I will always be grateful to the committee members for all their insightful comments and guidance, without whom I would have not been able to accomplish my goals and to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for the AIship given to me over the years; to the staff in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and in TESOL and Applied Linguistics for making all administrative processes less stressful; to Fulbright-LASPAU for making the first steps in this process possible; to the friends I left in Costa Rica whose friendship is still solid despite the distance, gracias Adrian, Lucy, Doña Mari y Juanca, Chalo, Juanca Gutierrez, Myrna, Bianchi, e Inés; to my friends in Bloomington, Paul, Moraima, Virginia, Sandy, Stephen, Zack, Sarah, Erin, Justine, Ben, Marda, Yudis, Rodolfo, Renato and colleagues who helped in one way or another. Thank you! I am especially thankful to my professors Manuel and Kim for pushing me to be always better and to follow sound research design; to Ken for introducing me to the field of statistics in a way that I would not have imagined I could explore, it really made a difference; and to Harry and Beverly, professors Gradman and Hartford, for believing that I could become a PhD and giving me the opportunity to further my studies in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. vi Finally, most of my gratitude goes to Dan, my partner, for keeping me sane and putting up with me during these nine years. I would not have made it without your support and love. I love you! vii Jorge Aguilar-Sánchez SYNTACTIC VARIATION: THE CASE OF COPULA CHOICE IN LIMÓN, COSTA RICA Various studies of copula (i.e., ser and estar) choice in Spanish in contact situations among Spanish-English bilinguals, in contexts where Spanish is not an official language (i.e., Southwestern United States) have shown that copula selection is undergoing change. The change from traditional usage is that the copula estar is becoming more accepted in an extended pre-adjectival context, especially with adjectives of size, physical appearance, age, and description and evaluation: this change was initially attributed to contact with English (Silva-Corvalán, 1986). This claim has been extended to monolingual Spanish by Gutiérrez (1992, 1994) because he found that monolingual Mexicans from the same social class as those studied by Silva-Corvalán (1986) showed the same behavior with regard to copula choice. Furthermore, Diaz- Campos & Geeslin (in press) found evidence of this phenomenon in an analysis of the spoken Spanish of Caracas, a context where Spanish is the official language and has no contact with English. Previous studies on the Spanish copula have mostly investigated settings where either Spanish is the only language spoken and the variety has been categorized as monolingual (e.g., Caracas, Venezuela), where Spanish is not the official language (e.g., Los Angeles), and contexts where Spanish is spoken widely, but English has an important role in formal education (e.g., Puerto Rico). Another context in which copula choice in Spanish has been investigated is the acquisition of Spanish as a foreign or second language. These studies have been conducted in settings where Spanish is not an official language (e.g., United States). There is a lack of evidence related to copula choice in contexts in which Spanish is an official language and English is not. The premise of this work is to help fill the gap created by the lack of studies in geographic areas where Spanish is the official language and it is in contact with English. Three questions were asked at the onset of this study. The first one was what linguistic factors predict the use of ser and estar + adjective in the Spanish spoken by Costa Ricans in Limón. The second was what social factors predict the use of ser and estar + adjective in the Spanish spoken by Costa Ricans in Limón. The last question was whether the pattern of variation in the use of ser and estar could be considered a change in progress or a stable change. After reviewing previous empirical work done on this topic; four methodological issues were of relevance to the design of the present work. These issues are: (1) the importance of a proper power analysis during the design stages, or the probability of correctly rejecting the null hypothesis when it is false in the population, (2) the analysis of the structure of the data to select the proper statistical analysis to be used, (3) polychotomization, or categorization, of continuous variables and its effect on the power of the study, and (4) the determination of sample size to achieve an adequate level of power. The present work introduces a methodology to determine sample sizes based on power for the study of sociolinguistic data and it provides the field of sociolinguistics with a modification to the variable rule analysis that allows us to see how social predictors help explain the variance, from a statistical point of view. Differences due to social factors are obscured when the data is aggregated; therefore, a viii multilevel analysis in the context of logistic regression is suggested as a more powerful method for the prediction of the influence of social predictors on linguistic phenomena. Five predictors were found to be statistically significant. These predictors were experience with the referent, adverb, subject, resultant state and adjective class. Three of these predictors, experience with the referent, resultant state and adjective class, have been shown to be very strong in the prediction of estar in different social and geographical contexts. However, these predictors are only strong predictors of estar when they are in conjunction with predictors such as predicate reading, susceptibility to change, and gradiency. It is determined that variation of copula choice in Limonese Spanish is first and foremost a syntactic phenomenon constraint by discursive and pragmatic features in accord with previous studies of copula choice in Spanish. This study shows that two varieties of Spanish can live in the same geographical area and be constrained by different social and linguistic factors. It also shows how contact with formal education, levels of bilingualism, and gender help explain variation of a syntactic structure. Monolingual Spanish behaves differently than bilingual Spanish because of access to formal education, or lack thereof, and levels of bilingualism. The extension of estar seems to be stable in the monolingual variety of Spanish while it is still ongoing in the bilingual variety of Spanish with younger speakers approximating the use of monolingual speakers. __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 ............................................................................................................................. 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 ............................................................................................................................. 7 Theoretical Background .................................................................................................. 7 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 7 Language Change and Language Contact....................................................................... 8 Costa Rica: A Multilingual Society ...............................................................................