Is Variation in Pronoun Usage in Caribbean and Mexican Spanish Contact-driven or Dialectal Preference?

Is Variation in Pronoun Usage in Caribbean and Mexican Spanish Contact-driven or Dialectal Preference? 

Mariana Villegas Venegas 

Spanish is categorized as a partial pro-drop language, where the subject pronoun may be omitted if it is pragmatically licensed since verbal inflection is rich enough to distinguish person and gender. Caribbean Spanish is special because pronoun usage in these dialects is dropped at a significantly lower rate that standard Spanish. This paper aims to add to the existing literature on whether contact with non-pro-drop languages influences the rate of change in overt pronoun expression. To do this, interviews from working-class people who natively speak Mexico City Spanish, and 3 Caribbean dialects (Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican) were transcribed from news clips to do a count of overt versus omitted pronouns. Mexico City Spanish was used as the point of comparison for Puerto Rican (in contact with English), Dominican (in contact with Haitian Creole), and Cuban Spanish (no significant contact with non-pro-drop languages). The results from this study do not support the notion that contact with non-pro-drop languages increases the rate of change to a pronoun obligatory parameter. Further research is needed with a larger sample of bilingual Spanish speakers who know a non-pro-drop language (simultaneous bilinguals versus sequential) divided by age groups and gender, as the literature cites that these factors also influence the rate at which people omit pronouns.