Reference: Activity 3
Who did it? Referring to people
Raúl and Henry use different strategies when referring to people in the Narrative Task. There are three characters: an old woman, a young woman, and a small female child. Use the table below to track how these two learners use language to refer to these characters in the narration. Then answer the questions below the table.
For each example of reference to a person, type in the appropriate cell the utterance used by each learner to refer to the character for the first time and each subsequent time. Spanish is a pro-drop or “null-subject” language, “where an overt subject is not syntactically obligatory,” while English almost always requires a syntactic subject (Lubbers Quesada, 2014). In Spanish, on second mention, pronouns like ‘ella’ not only can be, but should be, deleted because the reference is in the verb, as in ‘compra’=’she buys’. In the table below this is indicated as zero pronoun (Ø).
Raúl - Narrative Task
Transcript (PDF)
Henry - Narrative Task
Transcript (PDF)
| Reference | Henry (line #) | Raúl (line #) |
| First mention of old woman | 10: una mujer | 6: La señora |
| First mention of the young woman | ||
| Second mention of the old woman | ||
| Second mention of the young woman | ||
| First mention of the child | ||
| Second mention of the child | ||
| Third mention of the child | 9: Ø lo pone | |
| Third mention of the women | ||
| Fourth mention of the women | ||
| Fourth mention of the child |
How do the strategies of reference between the two learners compare? How are they different?
When you have finished typing your answer, click to compare your response with the Learner Language staff response.
In the table below, we indicate how each learner referred to each character in the story for the first and subsequent times. For comparison, we added a third column showing how a native speaker of Spanish referred to each character in telling this story.
| Narrative Task | Henry (line #) | Raúl (line #) | NS |
| First mention of old woman | 10: una mujer | 6: la señora | una señora |
| First mention of the young woman | 12: *una otra mujer que ella conozque posiblemente es su niña |
7: su amiga | otra señora que tenía su hija en un carrito. |
| Second mention of the old woman | 13: la primera mujer | 6: ella | la otra señora |
| Second mention of the young woman | 13: la otra mujer | ||
| First mention of the child | 13: una niña | 7: su...hija | su hija en un carrito (see above) |
| Second mention of the child | 14: la niña | 8: la niña, la hija de ella <points> | la hija que estaba in el carrito |
| Third mention of the child | 15: ella | 9: Ø lo pone | |
| Third mention of the women | 15: las mujeres | 7: Ø están hablando | |
| Fourth mention of the women | 18: la mujer original de la historia | ||
| Fourth mention of the child | 16: la niña |
The speaker’s decision to treat the information delivered by the noun phrase as either new or old is context-dependent and subject to the speaker’s pragmatic choice (Yule, 2004).
Henry uses more explicit subject markers in noun phrases (“la mujer”), while Raúl and the NS use pronouns (“ella” or “Ø”) throughout the task. They do this for both new and old information. Both Raúl and the NS refer to entities less overall, which is perhaps a result of Henry over-elaborating (see Tarone & Yule 1976)
As mentioned, it is preferred in Spanish to delete the pronoun in phrases in which the information is considered ‘old’ or already-mentioned; this is called zero pronoun. We notice that Henry never uses zero pronoun in this task, while Raúl does this twice (lines 7 & 9). If Henry’s preference to use the pronoun “ella” is due to English language transfer, then we can say that Raúl evidences less English transfer in his Spanish reference system.
