La alternancia PARA-PA' en tres comunidades de habla de Venezuela

Abstract

Se analiza el uso variable entre la forma completa y la abreviada de la preposición para (me voy para/pa Nueva York) en el español hablado en Venezuela. Los objetivos específicos del estudio son: i. Abstract: The variable use between the complete and the abbreviated form of the preposition para ("to" me voy para/pa Nueva York "I'm going to New York") is analyzed in Spanish spoken in Venezuela. The specific objectives of the study are: i.) to describe the alternation para~pa in the speech of three Venezuelan cities; ii) to determine if the variable use is correlated with linguistic, extralinguistic and/or dialectal factors. The sample consists of 72 recordings collected in Maracaibo, Caracas y Merida (Corpus Sociolingüístico of Maracaibo 1986, Corpus Sociolingüístico of Caracas 1987, Corpus Sociolingüístico of Merida 1995), equally stratified for sex, age, socioeconomic level and number of speakers per city. The utterances containing para~pa' were extracted from the corpus with the help of WordPilot 2002 and were coded for the above mentioned variables. A statistical analysis was carried out with the program GoldVarb_2001. The results show that low level speakers as well as the directional meaning of the prepositional construction with para~pa are the most significant variants for the use of pa'. Significant differences were also found in the frequency of para~pa' among the different dialects.