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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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2016

Earl K. Brown
Earl K. Brown*
Affiliation:
Kansas State University
*
*Address for correspondence: Earl K. Brown, 104 Eisenhower Hall, Manhattan, Kansas 66503, +1-785-532-6760, E-mail: [email protected]
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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 verb gustar ‘to like, to please’, referred to as experiential gustar (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 experiential gustar is 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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistic Geography , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , September 2015 , pp. 47 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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