A Minimalist approach to gender agreement in the Afro-Bolivian DP: Variation and the specification of uninterpretable features

This article analyzes gender-agreement variation in the Determiner Phrase (DP) of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS). We claim that this is an instance of crossgenerational change, consisting in the systematic substitution of stigmatized basilectal Afro-Bolivian features with more prestigious Bolivian Span...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Folia linguistica 2011-10, Vol.45 (2), p.465-488
Main Authors: Sessarego, Sandro, Gutiérrez-Rexach, Javier
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Afro-Bolivian Spanish
Descriptive studies and applied theories
determiner phrase
feature specification
gender agreement
Linguistics
minimalism
Syntax
variation
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Summary:This article analyzes gender-agreement variation in the Determiner Phrase (DP) of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS). We claim that this is an instance of crossgenerational change, consisting in the systematic substitution of stigmatized basilectal Afro-Bolivian features with more prestigious Bolivian Spanish ones. In light of recent minimalist models, the variability encountered in the corpus can be accounted for systematically as a by-product of the differential specification of uninterpretable features in a derivation. This study highlights an on-going process of post-bozal Spanish approximation to a more prestigious Spanish variety. Such transition seems to be driven by social factors and is significantly regulated by syntactic constraints.
ISSN:0165-4004
1614-7308
DOI:10.1515/flin.2011.017