Colloquium: Sonia Barnes

Linguistics colloquium: Sonia Barnes, Marquette University

Interactional stance, sociolinguistic style and the use of contact features in Asturian Spanish

This study investigates the relation between the use of Asturian third person ye, interactional stance and sociolinguistic style in Asturian Spanish. Using interview data from 12 speakers from the city of Gijón, quantitative and interactional analyses were performed in order to explore how Asturian ye is used at the local level to mark particular types of stance. The results show that ye was often used to mitigate the speaker’s commitment to the propositional content of an utterance in an interview context. Speakers used ye instead of es in hyperbolic statements or in negative evaluations (such as insults) while simultaneously showing playfulness or lack of seriousness. In contrast, the Spanish variant was more likely to occur with expressions of certainty. The use of ye was also significantly higher in speech activities that had social interaction as their goal, such as commiserating, joking or gossiping. Interactional analyses of short extracts of each conversation were also performed. These analyses revealed that through the use of Asturian ye speakers performed particular acts of styling in which they presented themselves as playful, informal and laid-back. This stylization also makes use of other Asturian features and connects individual performances to variation on a larger social scale, where the use of Asturian features is associated with working-class and rural speech.