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. 283–304

Spanish and Portuguese parallels

Impoverished number agreement as a vernacular feature of two rural dialects

| University of Texas at Austin
| Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco
This paper investigates variable number agreement phenomena across the Determiner Phrase (DP) of two non-standard varieties of Spanish and Portuguese spoken in Latin America: Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS) and Popular Brazilian Portuguese (PBP). In line with recent studies in the field of minimalist syntax (Adger & Smith, 2005; Sessarego, 2014), this article combines sociolinguistic techniques of data collection with generative models of analysis to obtain more fine-grained, empirically testable generalizations. The presence of an impoverished agreement system in these two varieties is studied in light of recent linguistic proposals on the nature of default values (Harley & Ritter, 2002). These findings are generalized to other grammatical constructions, which systematically occur across a number of vernacular dialects.
Keywords: Afro-Bolivian Spanish, determiner phrase, number agreement, Popular Brazilian Portuguese, rural dialects
Published online: 25 May 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.8.12ses
References

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