Speakers must command different linguistic registers to index various social-discourse elements, including the identity of the addressee. Previous work found that English-learning children could link registers to appropriate addressees by 5 years. Two experiments found that better cues to the linguistic form or to the social meaning of register…

This study examined the +/- presence of Spanish subject personal pronouns ("yo," "el/ella," "nosotros/nosotras," and "ellos/ellas" ) in sociolinguistic interviews of 36 Mexican-Americans from Houston, Texas (16 of 2nd generation and 20 of 3rd generation), and 20 Mexicans (control group) from Heroica…

Research that examines diachronic change and modality posit that modal verbs follow certain universal paths of development (e.g. Cornillie, 2007; Bybee & Fleischman, 1995; Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca, 1994). The present study examines the development of Spanish modality in Mexico through the use of multivariate analyses, relative…

This thesis contributes to the growing field of ethnophysiography, a new subfield of cognitive anthropology that aims to determine the universals and variation in the categorization of landscape objects across cultures. More specifically, this work looks at the case of the Seri people of Sonora, Mexico to investigate the way they categorize…

Recent research in language contact has investigated bilingual deviations from monolingual norms where syntax interfaces with the lexical and discourse components of the grammar (e.g. Iverson & Rothman 2008; Lozano 2006; Montrul 2004, 2005; Sorace & Filiaci 2006; Tsimpli et al. 2004). Such studies generally show that the…

Provides pedagogical rules for selecting relative pronouns in Spanish. Sixteen different linguistic environments in which relative pronoun usage occurs are categorized according to their different syntactic relationships and semantic intentions. (SL)