The Syntactic and Discourse Properties of Second Person Singular Forms of Address in Paisa Spanish

Abstract In this study we examine the linguistic complexity and lexical properties of the discourse associated with second person singular forms of address (2PS) in the Spanish spoken in Medellín, Colombia. This Spanish variety exhibits the use of a tripartite system of 2PS, in which voseo, tuteo, and ustedeo are used, and sometimes interchanged, according to sociopragmatic factors. By means of a discourse completion task (DCT), 672 responses were collected from 38 informants. Data was parsed and tagged using UDPipe to train an annotation Spanish model. Syntactic and lexical properties were extracted automatically in Python. Results revealed the syntactic properties and the existence of collocations significantly associated with each 2PS. The discourse associated with vos differs in terms of the predicate structure, DCT response length, pragmatic function, and use of colloquial speech markers. Results of this work shed further light on the variable use of 2PS in this intriguing Spanish dialect.