I'm feeling feisty and want to put something out there.
I read a lot of materials produced by Spanish language teachers, e.g. books, short stories, summaries of little videos. And one thing I often notice that just gets under my skin is an overabundance of subject pronouns. Seeing overt subject pronouns several sentences in a row for a subject that hasn't changed (and it isn't meant to be emphasizing) triggers weird processing in my brain; I don't like it. Spanish is a pro-drop language, meaning that subject pronouns can be omitted. But it's not just that they can, it's that in many cases they should, and including them when they're not needed is weird and unnatural. Subject pronouns can be necessary to establish or clarify the subject, but after that, if they continue to be included only serving to reinforce the meaning of the verb ending, that's a big nope for me. To my (albeit nonnative) eyes (and sort of ears, as I tend to subvocalize when I'm reading in Spanish moreso than in English), it does one of two things to me.
Also, from a theoretical standpoint (specifically Input Processing), the unnecessary inclusion of SPs, since they provide lexical information that makes the verbal morphology redundant, likely make students less likely to process verb endings at all. Bill VanPatten, in an episode of his podcast Tea with BVP, brings up the example of past tense. Learners are more likely to pay attention to lexical information like an adverb of time, e.g. "ayer," and completely ignore the verbal morphology (this has been demonstrated through research e.g. with eye-tracking experiments). Of course, there are two possible explanations for that. Either it's
Person morphology would be arguably the same. Except I'd say it's even more important in this case to be mindful of the overuse of the lexical component (the subject pronoun) because while the presence or absence of a time adverb doesn't change the processing of the sentence (it just clarifies), the inclusion of subject pronouns when the subject has already been established impacts how that sentence is processed (e.g. the aforementioned jabby finger). I'm sure the pronoun overuse is being done out of a desire to add context and reinforcement to the meaning of the verb ending. But it sets bad precedent for students. Can we agree to not do this so much?
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June 2019
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