Priming as a Diagnostic of Grammatical Constructions: Second-Person Singular in Chilean Spanish

Structural priming has been described as a measure of association between constructions. Here, we apply priming as a diagnostic to assess the status of the Chilean second-person singular (2sg) <i>voseo</i>, which exists in variation with the more standard <i>tuteo</i>. Despite being the majority variant in informal interactions, Chileans are reported to have little metalinguistic awareness of <i>voseo</i> and they avoid the <i>vos</i> pronoun, in some cases using the <i>tú</i> pronoun with <i>voseo</i> verb forms, leading to proposals that <i>tuteo</i> and <i>voseo</i> are conflated into a single mixed form. The patterning for priming, however, indicates otherwise. Analyses of some 2000 2sg familiar tokens from a corpus of conversational Chilean Spanish reveal that a previous <i>tuteo</i> or <i>voseo</i> favors the repetition of that same form, indicating that speakers do treat these forms as distinct. We also observe that invariable forms with historically <i>tuteo</i> morphology are associated with neither <i>voseo</i> nor <i>tuteo</i>, while the invariable <i>voseo</i> discourse marker <i>cachái</i> ‘you know’ retains a weak association with <i>voseo</i>. Furthermore, while <i>tuteo</i> is favored with a <i>tú</i> subject pronoun, this effect does not override the priming effect, evidence that, even with a <i>tú</i> pronoun, <i>voseo</i> and <i>tuteo</i> are distinct constructions in speakers’ representations.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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