"Por ahí agarrábanos los autobuses": A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Alternation between -mos/-nos in Spanish

Abstract

The present investigation examines, by means of a variationist analysis in oral data, the alternation between -mos/-nos in the Spanish of Mérida, Venezuela. An examination of lexical frequency, as well as sociolinguistic factors, is presented to offer a preliminary account of this phenomenon. The Mérida corpus comprises a sample of speakers that consisted of 40 males and 40 females. The findings support the argument that analogy is related to the general notion of first person plural. The frequency of the use of -nos indicates that -nos is the form used most to convey the first person plural. This is why -nos is the best candidate to be in variation with -mos, which by contrast is less frequent and has a more peripheral location in the exemplar representation. Social factors revealed that older speakers and females favor the use of -nos. The use of -nos can be categorized as a stereotype since this variant is exclusively found in the lower socioeconomic background speakers.