ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses new light on subject expression in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRSp) through the contribution of data from an area outside the often-studied metropolitan area of San Juan. With regard to subject expression, much work has been done on subject forms, with the bulk of work focused on the appearance of overt subject personal pronouns (SPPs). In Spanish, priming can be observed both within the same speaker and between speakers in the course of conversational interaction. Within the variationist literature, rates of overt SPP expression have been identified for many places in the Spanish-speaking world. The use of the SPPs in Spanish as a first and second language has been studied, mainly among adults, but also among children. Work in the generativist tradition has attempted to characterize the properties of the Null Subject Parameter, or what properties of a language allow it to have null subjects.
