Clitic climbing in Caracas Spanish: A sociolinguistic study of ir and querer

Main Article Content

Aarnes Gudmestad

Abstract

The present study investigates clitic climbing in spoken Modern Spanish of Caracas, Venezuela. The data come from a corpus of oral interviews. All examples of clitics appearing with the finite verbs ir to go and querer to want followed by a nonfinite verb are coded for linguistic and social factors. Linguistic variables include verb tense and type and clitic animacy, person, and number. The social variables are socioeconomic class, gender, and age. Results show that clitic placement was significantly more frequent in the pre-finite position than in the post-nonfinite position. The two verbs also behave differently. Linguistic features influence clitic placement for ir, whereas social factors influence clitic placement for querer.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Article Details

Section
Articles