The unstressed third-person pronominal system in the Spanish variety in contact with Yucatecan Maya

Abstract

In this paper we examine the atonic pronominal system (third person) of Spanish speakers in contact with Yucatec Maya. The corpus included interviews and a language task from 27 participants, who were classified according to their degree of mono/bilinguism and their education level. By means of a multivariate analysis, dependence relations between the variables, with crossings between internal and external ones, were determined. We demonstrate that this system evidences a tendency similar to the one found in other varieties of Spanish in intense language contact: the atonic pronominal forms of accusative tend not to specify the features of gender and number. We argue that along with the process of grammaticalization of the pronominal forms as object agreement, the Maya language acts as an accelerator of the change and enables the reorganization and recategorization of the atonic pronominal system of third person. This change has been completed in the consecutive bilinguals of Spanish as L2; and from this group, the change is spreading to the others displayed precisely in the most prototypical object entities (defined, inanimate and continuous), and in highly accessible contexts, where the referent is more active in the speaker and the interlocutor’s mind.