Article published in:
Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis
Edited by Sandro Sessarego and Fernando Tejedo-Herrero
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 8] 2016
► pp. 155–176

Children’s Spanish subject pronoun expression

A developmental change in tú?

| University of New Mexico
This study explores children’s acquisition of structured morphosyntactic variation by examining Spanish subject pronoun expression. Analyses of 5,923 verbs produced by 154 Mexican children, ages 6 to 16, show that the variables that most strongly constrain the oldest children’s pronoun usage – Person, Reference, Priming – are acquired first during childhood. These variables exert similar effects across age, with the exception of second-person singular, which favors tú expression among younger children and tú omission among older children. The developmental trajectory from more to less tú expression is explained as the result of (a) increasing production of nonspecific reference, which in turn decreases rates of tú, and (b) abundant reported speech in the younger children’s data, which rendered tú expression pragmatically appropriate.
Keywords: child language development, nonspecific reference, politeness, Spanish subject pronouns, variation in child language
Published online: 25 May 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.8.06shi
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