Setting parametric limits on dialectal variation in Spanish

Subject-verb word order in Spanish interrogatives

“…is indicative of a movement in Spanish from flexible to rigid word order (Morales 1989;Toribio 2000). We find high rates of subject expression (51%) and a strong preference for SV word order (47%) over VS (4%) in all sentence types, inline with assertions of fixed SVO word order.…”

Revisiting the Null Subject Parameter: New Insights from Afro-Peruvian Spanish

“…The half-way nature of these grammars has gained them the label of "partial pro-drop systems". Some studies have tried to account for the variation attested in these dialects by postulating that speakers of these varieties are somehow bilingual in their own language, thus they would be able to switch between +NSP and -NSP configurations within a single grammar (Toribio 2000), while others prefer to see the phenomena found in these dialects as the result of a change in progress, where NSL systems would be in the process of turning into NNSLs (Camacho 2008(Camacho , 2013. Toribio (2000: 315-316) begins her well-known study on DS pro-drop phenomena by making a statement that is somehow symptomatic of the long-lasting academic clash between syntacticians and sociolinguists:…”

Microvariation in Spanish Comparatives

“…For related discussion see Bickerton (1971) and Henry (1995), where syntactic variation has been argued to result from multiple grammars or multiple parametric settings being available to the speakers, respectively. See Toribio (2000) for related discussion concerning the analysis of preverbal subjects in Dominican Spanish. See also Labov (1972), a.o., for the view that probabilities are built into the definition of grammatical rules.…”