ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on the expression and placement of pronominal subjects and the placement of lexical subjects by first- and second-generation Spanish-speaking Caribbeans in New York City. We examine whether differences in subject placement and expression in both declarative and interrogative sentences can be explained by appealing to the pro-drop parameter. Specifically, we test Brown and Rivas’s four-step proposal for the process by which a language would transition from being pro-drop toward a variety that is non-pro-drop. We find evidence of increased subject pronoun expression (Step 1), as well as increased word order rigidity for pronominal and lexical subjects in declarative utterances (Steps 2 and 3) across the two generations. We do not find clear evidence of preference for Subject-Verb (SV) order in interrogatives (Step 4). In fact, the second-generation Caribbean participants tend to use inversion in interrogatives more often than their first-generation counterparts. This, however, is based on limited data and further analyses with more verb tokens are needed to confirm this finding. Finally, we explore the possibility that the intergenerational differences observed can be a consequence of the differential input for acquisition of Spanish received by the first- and second-generation speakers, leading to the development of a dialect of Spanish in transition from a Caribbean variety to a US variety, with a word order more similar to that of English.
