Spanish variable direct object marking: Dealing with dependence among linguistic and social factors
Issue: Vol 1 No. 1 (2014)
Journal: Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science
Subject Areas: Linguistics
Abstract:
In studying the social conditioning of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish we show a social dimension underlying the variable use of DOM: age of speakers has a moderate but significant effect, with middle-aged speakers showing an increase in overt marking. Previously, the implicit consensus was that there is no sociolectal variation in DOM. To ensure the statistical validity of our results, we developed an original, rigorous, quantitative approach to correct for the unbalanced distribution of the data across factor groups. A problem that has been frequently mentioned in the specialized literature, but never satisfactorily resolved for the linguistic analysis of corpus data.
Author: Sonia Balasch
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