Describes the behavior of the phoneme /s/ in Central American Spanish by comparing the speech patterns of residents of Guatemala City, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, San Jose, and Managua. Considers the possible diachronic processes which could have given rise to the current configurations and the theoretical consequences implied by the…

The uses of the eleven Spanish clitic pronouns are discussed for various regional dialects and formal and colloquial speech in Spain and Latin America. (Text is in Spanish.) (CHK)

An overview of contemporary Hispanic dialectology, focusing on phonological phenomena, syntax, classification schemes, and bilingual communities, demonstrates that dialectology has long ceased to be the collection of innumerable surface deviations. It is suggested that dialectology is a theoretical discipline searching for universal principles to…

Discusses the Puerto Rican dialect and its peculiar placement of subject pronouns. Notes the linguistic variety in the dialect as well as its use of verbs connotating mental and communicative activity and constructions of relativity. These distinctions give rise to the functional hypothesis to account for the peculiarities of Spanish in the…