Leísmo in contemporary Spanish American educated speech

The present study, based on a corpus of some 1,265,000 words in the form of contemporary educated speech samples recorded in situ in Bogota, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Havana, La Paz, Lima, Mexico City, San Jose (Costa Rica), San Juan (Puerto Rico), and Santiago (Chile), proposes that leismo, the use in Spanish of le as a direct object pronoun, as in A Juan le vi ayer, be rejected as a phenomenon that forms part of the syntax of American Spanish. Reported cases of Spanish American leismo are shown to be, for the most part, a misunderstanding of the syntactic function of certain uses of the indirect object le, mistakenly reported as a direct object of a number of verbs that alternate between usage of indirect object le and direct object lo in accordance with differing semantic interpretations. Also rejected as cases of Spanish American leismo are the use of le in the impersonal se le construction, the so-called leismo de cortesia, and the use of an accusative le originating from contact with a substratum indigenous language

Art · Geography · Humanities · Indigenous · Linguistics · Object (grammar) · Phenomenon · Pronoun · Syntax · Cultural and political discourse analysis · History · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

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