Spanish as a Pronominal Argument Language: The Spanish Interlanguage of Mexicano Speakers

Vernacular second-language acquisition is emerging as an important research site for the study of the universal cognitive foundations of human language (cf. Bickerton 1981; Anderson 1984; and Rutherford 1984). Recent workers have emphasized that the "interlanguages " (Selinker 1972) of adult language learners are, like the developing languages of children, orderly and regular systems, within which linguists may explore the cognitive regula-rities which constitute core grammar. The present paper examines an interlingual form of Spanish spoken by bilingual speakers of Mexicano (Nahuatl) and Spanish in the communities of the Malinche Volcano region of Puebla and Tlaxcala, Mexico.1 The precise typological difference between Mexicano and Spanish is not clear. Mexicano appears to be what Jelinek (1984, 1985) and Jelinek and Demers (1985) have called a "pronominal-argument " language. Spanish exhibits the property often called "pro- drop ", so that sentences without lexical arguments are possible. Jelinek (1984) has argued that the pro-drop feature of Spanish might be handled within the framework which she has proposed for pronominal- argument languages, with pronouns, when present, being considered as nominal adjuncts.2 The study of the 1 Fieldwork in the Malinche Volcano region has been support-ed by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, th