On the utility of combining production data and perceptual data to investigate regional linguistic variation: The case of Spanish experiential gustar ‘to like, to please’ on Twitter and in an online survey

Abstract

The use of both production and perceptual data has the potential to provide a more complete picture of linguistic phenomena than would otherwise be the case, including when exploring regional linguistic variation. Utilizing the social networking platform Twitter and an online survey, this paper reports on a descriptive analysis of the geographic distribution of a less-commonly used syntactic form of the Spanish verbgustar‘to like, to please’, referred to as experientialgustar(e.g.,cuando gustes‘when you’d like’). The results from the analysis of 6,686 tweets together with the responses of 81 native Spanish-speaking participants in an online survey suggest that experientialgustaris produced and is perceived to be produced most often in Mexican Spanish, despite not being exclusive to that country. The paper contributes to the literature depicting the benefit of using both production and perceptual data in the study of dialectal variation, as well as to the literature documenting language variation in Spanish.

Why do we say them when we know it should be they? Twitter as a resource for investigating nonstandard syntactic variation in The Netherlands

“…Twitter distributions of these features, moreover, pattern so well with traditionally observed distributions that they are eminently suited for probing regional patterns that would otherwise be too laborious to investigate. For example, Jones (2015) demonstrated that orthographically represented features of AAVE on Twitter pattern with the geographic spread of the Black population in the United States, Brown (2016) investigated the distribution of a Spanish construction on a much wider geographic scale than before, and Haddican and Johnson (2012) found that respondents from the UK and Ireland favored discontinuous particle verb orders ( she cut the melon open ), while US and Canadian participants preferred the continuous order.…”

Variation in interrogative adverbials: 'cuán', 'qué tan', 'cómo de','lo que' and 'lo'+adj./adv.+'que'

“…2 This corpus was created from online sources between 2013 and 2014, 60% of which are blogs. It should be noted before moving on that while corpora are an invaluable source of linguistic data, they are not without their drawbacks (Brown 2015). There are always issues with typographic, compilation, and tagging errors in corpora.…”

"¿Por qué no gustas de mí, como yo gusto de ti?" El verbo "gustar" y su complemento preposicional en español actual

“…Además, como ya señalaron estudios anteriores para el español rioplatense (Brown 2016; Elizaincín y González 2016; Elizaincín 2012), hemos visto que el uso preposicional con pronombre personal tónico [NOM + gustar + de + pronombre personal] puede expresar la atracción amorosa. Por otro lado, el empleo del sentido afectivo está mucho más extendido de lo que se ha propuesto en esos estudios previos (Brown 2016;Elizaincín y González 2016). Concretamente, se documenta en todos los países hispanohablantes, salvo en Bolivia, Costa Rica, Cuba y Puerto Rico.…”