http://hdl.handle.net/1803/241 Mon, 13 May 2013 02:20:06 GMT 2013-05-13T02:20:06Z http://hdl.handle.net/1803/3980 Title: Subjective Reactions to Phonological Variation in Costa Rican Spanish Authors: Berk-Seligson, Susan Abstract: The results of a subjective reaction test on a sample of 440 Costa Ricans indicate that in societies where educational levels are not generally high, social status groups may be differentiated phonologically by the use of prestigeful features rather than by stigmatized ones, contrary to findings regarding social dialects in the United States. Participating listeners discriminated between three speakers whose reading of a Spanish text varied only according to their percentage use of stigmatized and prestige phonological variables--specifically, accent shift, vowel alternation, and consonantal alternation. As hypothesized, listeners assigned occupational status to, distanced themselves socially from, and attributed personality and socioeconomically related traits to speakers according to the degree of prestigefulness or stigmatization of the latter's speech. However, whereas listeners could distinguish well between the prestige speaker, on the one hand, and the intermediate and stigmatized speakers on the other, they barely differentiated between the latter two. Whereas male and female listeners did not differ significantly from each other in their reactions, contrary to expectation, older listeners, compared to younger ones, significantly more often discriminated between speakers in the expected direction, confirming further that sociolinguistic competence is acquired gradually. Sun, 01 Jan 1984 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1803/3980 1984-01-01T06:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1803/3978 Title: From New York to the World: An Interview with Tato Laviera Authors: Luis, William Wed, 01 Jan 1992 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1803/3978 1992-01-01T06:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1803/3977 Title: Review: Order and Disorder in Caribbean Thought and Literature Authors: Luis, William Wed, 01 Jan 1992 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1803/3977 1992-01-01T06:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1803/3832 Title: Linguistic constraints on intrasentential code-switching: a study of Spanish/Hebrew bilingualism Authors: Berk-Seligson, Susan Abstract: In recent years, research has increasingly pointed toward the universality of three linguistic constraints on code-switching: (i) an equivalence of structure constraint, (2) a size-of-constituent constraint, and (3) a free morpheme constraint. The evidence derived from this study challenges the universality of the first two of these constraints, and argues instead that their claim to universality is largely a function of the coincidental relative similarity in the syntactic structure of Spanish and English, the two languages upon which most code-switching studies have been based. The present study breaks out of the Spanish-English mold and draws upon data from a language contact situation in which the two languages are syntactically very different from each other, namely, Spanish and Hebrew. The evidence presented also challenges the frequently made assertion that type of code-switching, namely, intra-versus intersentential code-switching, is correlated with degree of bilingualism of the speaker. Finally, the evidence suggests that intrasentential code-switching ability cannot, as some have argued, universally be considered a measure of bilingualism nor a mark of the balanced bilingual. (Code-switching, Spanish, Hebrew, bilingualism, syntactic constraints) Wed, 01 Jan 1986 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1803/3832 1986-01-01T06:00:00Z