Advances in the study of lexical, phonological and grammatical variation and contact in Spanish in New York.

As the second most widely spoken language in the City after English, Spanish in New York has long been the object of scholarly attention. Recent publications have reported on work based on data from the Otheguy-Zentella corpus, one of the largest corpora of spoken Spanish ever gathered in the United States. The corpus provides the common thread for research in this issue, which addresses problems having to do with phonology, lexicon, and grammar in Spanish in New York. Some of the papers address issues of language contact, others look at Spanish in the City without reference to the influence of English. The data from the corpus consists of naturalistic speech samples obtained from both first- and second-generation speakers from a variety of Latin American origins. The papers deal with the relationship between loanwords and collocations, the role of efficiency in determining which patrimonial words are retained and which replaced by loanwords, the nature of suprasegmental variation in phonology, and the variable use of subject personal pronouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]