Resumen de Uso del sujeto y del objeto directo en el habla de once ciudades hispanohablantes

Mercedes Sedano, Paola Bentivoglio

• We present an exploratory quantitative analysis of the form and position of the main constituents —subject (S) and direct object (OD)— in a corpus of two speakers, a man and a woman, middle aged and with higher education, belonging to five cities from Spain and six from the New World, respectively. We analyzed 2,200 words of twenty two speakers recorded for the “Proyecto del Estudio Sociolingüístico de España y de América (PRESEEA)”. Our goal was to ascertain whether basic word order varies substantially from one place to another. The results, though limited because of the small number of speakers and correspondent tokens, show that: i) S’s tend to be preverbal and OD’s postverbal; ii) frequency of null S’s is higher; iii) S-clauses tend to be postverbal; iv) OD’s, independently of their form, are almost categorically postponed; iv) the pronominal subject most frequently used is yo; and v) there are no dialect or gender-related differences. Our results confirm those of previous extended research on word order both in Peninsular and American dialects.