Variação linguística na expressão do sujeito pronominal no espanhol de Cuba / Linguistic Variation in the Expression of the Pronominal Subject in Cuban Spanish

Abstract

It is commom to consider the Caribbean region as the most compact and uniform of the Spanish areas. In the field of syntax, one of the outstanding characteristics that would differentiate the Caribbean variety from other varieties of Spanish is precisely the frequent explicit expression of the pronominal subject, even in neutral contexts. In this work, we investigated whether the Cuban Spanish, which has received little attention from the literature so far, behaves in a similar way or distances itself from the other varieties that make up the Caribbean zone, with regard to the expression of the pronominal subject. Therefore, based on a Labovian-based sociolinguistic theoretical and methodological orientation (WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 2006[1968]; LABOV, 2008[1972], 1994), the corpus used consists of the interviews provided by the PRESEEA project (Proyecto para el estudio sociolingüistico del español de España y América). The general results indicate that the null subject is the preferred strategy in this variety. However, when compared to the pronominal rates found in other studies – whether of the Cuban variety or other varieties – it is noted that Cuba behaves similarly to other varieties in the Caribbean area.