Variable subject of third person singular in the speech of Montevideo

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to describe the alternation between the presence and absence of third person singular subject in the Spanish dialect of Montevideo, so that new data can be provided about this morphosyntactic variation. This phenomenon consists in that the grammatical subject can be expressed by means of an explicit or implicit form in a personal clause with conjugated verb. In order to carry out this research, a sample of twelve semidirected interviews, belonging to the sociolinguistic corpus of Montevideo, attached to PRESEEA, was analyzed. The alternation was correlated with linguistic variables—verbal typology, ambiguity, turn of conversation, speech connectivity and distance clause—and social variables—sex, age and degree of instruction—. The results show that the use of explicit pronominal forms of subject of a third singular person is due to discursive reasons linked to textual cohesion.