No se sabía de que eso iba a pasar: Do lexical frequency and structural priming condition dequeísmo?
Published in The Routledge Handbook of Variationist Approaches to Spanish, 2021
Abstract
This study contributes a new analysis of dequeísmo, innovative use of postverbal de, in the Spanish of Caracas. We coded 160 sociolinguistic interviews for discourse topic, number of intervening words, verb tense‑mood‑aspect, and main‑clause subject, along with speaker age, gender, and social class. The analysis diverges from prior work by coding two novel variables informed by usage-based approaches: lexical frequency and structural priming. Individual speaker and verb lexeme, hitherto absent from research on dequeísmo, were considered as random effects. Although lexical frequency lacked significance, less frequent word forms co-occurred with de at notably higher rates. Structural priming was likewise not significant, but de was used at substantially higher rates when de que occurred within the previous 20 clauses. Considering random effects revealed that social class played a lesser role than previously reported, whereas discourse topic, verb tense-mood-aspect, intervention, and speaker age remained significant.
Recommended citation: Kanwit, M., & Berríos, J. (2021). "No se sabía de que eso iba a pasar: Variation in the use of the ‘dequeísmo’ structure in Spanish." In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Variationist Approaches to Spanish (pp. 653–669). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429200267-41
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