¿Qué empezamos con?

Attitudes, input, and acceptance of preposition stranding in U.S. Spanish

Abstract

This study investigates Heritage Spanish Speakers’ (HSSs) perceptions of U.S. Spanish in relation to their acceptability judgements of preposition stranding (PS) in Spanish, while considering their linguistic attitudes and prior exposure to this non-standard feature—an underexplored perspective in HSS research. To accomplish this, we recruited 38 HSSs to complete a written contextualized acceptability judgement task that contained PS in intra-sentential English/Spanish code-switched (CS) sentences. Prior-reported exposure to PS and the stranded preposition significantly affected PS acceptability, as did participants’ speech region and variety of Spanish.

Our results showed that de, ‘from’ was the preposition most likely to be accepted in PS, with para, ‘for’ being the least acceptable. We also replicated previous findings that CS directionality, i.e., the language of the clause and therefore preposition, played a significant role. Furthermore, we found that participants who reported no prior exposure to PS in Spanish rejected it in Spanish significantly more than those who reported having been exposed to it before. We highlight our methodological contributions to both CS acceptability judgement tasks and written contextualized tasks and the role that linguistic attitudes may play in future CS and PS research on HSSs.