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The gendered use of salirse in Mexican Spanish: Si me salía yo con las amigas, se enojaba

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2004

JESSI ELANA AARON
JESSI ELANA AARON
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, MSC03 21001, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, jaaron@unm.edu
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Abstract

It has been claimed that women and men use language quite differently in social interaction. Combining a functional and cognitive approach to grammar, this article explores the ways in which men and women use the optional pronominal form of the Spanish verb salir(se) ‘to leave’ in Mexican Spanish. It is found that women use the pronominal form notably more than men, and that, diachronically, this form has traditionally been applied to women's behavior. It is hypothesized that these patterns demonstrate both the relative expressive freedom of women's speech and the socially constrained nature of expectations for female behavior in colonial and contemporary Mexican society. It is shown how culturally shaped conventional construals of gender can both be reflected in and influence morphosyntactic phenomena.I would like to thank Melissa Axelrod, Kathy McKnight, Language in Society editor Jane Hill, and two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions on this article.

Keywords

Spanishgenderenergetic constructions.
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 585 - 607
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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