Subject Personal Pronouns in Spanish Narratives of Puerto Ricans in New York City: A Sociolinguistic Perspective (review)

In this interesting study, Flores-Ferrán takes a look at the explicit use of Spanish subject personal pronouns (SPPs) among Puerto Ricans in New York City (NYC). She studies whether this feature of Puerto Rican Spanish persists in speakers residing in NYC and if it is manifested in the same environments. Most notably, she looks at whether narrative style affects the use of SPPs, in particular the effect of conflict narratives in which the speaker is a participant in the conflict. She elicited these particular narratives because it has been found for other varieties of Spanish that speakers retelling conflict narratives have a much higher ratio of SPP usage than speakers of other types of narratives.

F-F investigates a number of internal and external factors that may affect explicit usage of SPPs. The internal factors she measures relate to reference relations (e.g. the form used previously to refer to the subject and the distance to the last mention of the subject) and external factors such as age and gender, among others.

She also examines conflict in conjunction with the other factors that correlate with increased SPP usage such as switch reference and the extent of the speaker’s contact with English. The discussion of the effect of contact with English is the least convincing part of an otherwise well-constructed study. The study provides only a cursory treatment of this topic and no independent measure of the subjects’ language ability. According to F-F, the degree of exposure to English was based on the amount of time spent in NYC—which neither classifies the English ability of any speaker, nor takes into account possible exposure to English in Puerto Rico. She says people who have been ‘in the city for a long time can be presumed to be strongly bilingual’ (106); however, bilingualism in Puerto Rico is also quite extensive, which may explain why, for most factors, she found little difference in usage between the island and the city. A future study that truly looks at this feature in both NYC and Puerto Rico and measures language competence in both languages is necessary.

In addition, F-F only gives cursory attention to the phonological process of final-syllable deletion (and the resulting loss of morphological information concerning the subject) that is well-documented for the Caribbean varieties of Spanish.

The book contains a wealth of details about the participants of the study and includes a detailed methodology section with the coding system explicitly explained. The statistical analysis of the data is compared to studies of Spanish in Puerto Rico, with the finding that New York City Puerto Ricans had more overt SSPs than those in Puerto Rico only in switch references. On other measures, use for both groups was similar. What is new here is her look at conflict narratives, which adds significantly to previous research relating conflict narratives and the explicit use of SPPs. She finishes the book with a list of intriguing questions raised by her study that I hope she will continue to research.