INTRODUCTION
Studies of sociolinguistic variation, whether in social class, age,
or gender, have offered linguists and society at large special insights
into the communicative and social functions of language in everyday
discourse.1
By “discourse,” I
mean “the loose, unplanned, informal mode of communication in
language” (Hopper & Traugott
1993:168).
This variation is a subtle resource of the
linguistic system which is used to express “social meaning
– nuances of emotion, attitude, social identity – without
actually stating it in so many words” (
Eckert
1998:64).
Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (1998:484)
call for an innovative perspective in new studies on language and
gender, stating that “theoretical insight into how language and
gender interact requires a close look at social practices in which they
are jointly produced.” Furthermore, they point out that
“the danger … is that the real force and import of their
interaction [of language and gender] is erased when we
abstract each uncritically from [these] social practices
… in which they intermingle with other symbolic and social
phenomena” (1998:485). Thus, social
variables and an understanding of the social reality are crucial to any
study of the use and function of grammatical structures in everyday social
interaction.
The ways in which women and men use pragmatic options differently in
discourse is a topic that has been explored by various scholars (e.g.
Coates 1993, 1998;
Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1998). While
some have argued that women and men use the same pragmatic options
(such as tag questions and hedges) with different underlying functions
(Tannen 1998, Coates
1993), others argue that these options serve the same purpose
for both men and women, but that their uses differ quantitatively
(Eckert 1998, Cameron
1998). Most of these studies focus either on discourse markers,
such as hedges, or on phonological variables, such as accent, and have
proposed various motivations for gender variation, including separate
subcultures for women and men, female subordination and male dominance,
and the favoring of symbolic capital. No study of which I am aware,
however, has examined gender variation under a cognitive perspective in
which a socially constituted, characteristic construal of scenes shapes
distributional patterns. This article explores this possibility,
offering a new kind of explanation for gender variation not yet touched
in the gender-and-language literature.
Although the hypothesis that conventional construals may shape gender
variation is new, the basic idea on which it stands – that
morphosyntactic variation can be constrained by socioculturally
influenced construals – is not. Recently, an exciting volume of
work entitled Ethnosyntax (Enfield
2002) has explored the relationships among culture, construals,
and variation. Enfield makes explicit the inherent interconnectedness
of language and culture (2002:22), stating:
Morphosyntactic devices which are not necessarily
culture-specific in semantic terms – such as switch-reference
systems and classifier constructions – may nevertheless be
used differently, where those differences have
culture-specific motivations. Thus, culture-specific uses of such
non-culture-specific devices may relate to the pragmatic effects of
different ‘cultural premises’ … or to
culture-specific semantics of the lexical items involved. (Enfield
2002:8, emphasis in original)
In other words, distributional patterns of morphosyntactic phenomena
such as salir(se) ‘to leave’ variation in Spanish
may be explained through the examination of sociocultural premises
specific to the society in which the phenomena are considered. Gender,
like other social constructs, is a candidate in helping to shape these
premises.
I will follow a functional-cognitive, variationist approach in the
following analysis of the use of one verb in contemporary and colonial
Mexican Spanish: salir(se). In Spanish intransitive verbs of
motion, an option sometimes exists between using an unmarked (i.e.,
root intransitive) form or a pronominal form.2
Spanish is not unique in possessing this construction.
Languages as diverse as Classical Greek, Hungarian, A. Quechua,
Lingala, Pangwa, Guugu Yimidhirr, Fula, Old Norse, Indonesian, and
Rumanian have similar constructions (Kemmer
1994:198).
The specific semantic and pragmatic
implications of this choice differ from verb to verb. I will argue that
Mexican women consistently choose the pronominal form of
salir(se) more often than men, adding expressiveness and force
to their speech, and demonstrating their relative freedom to use
expressivity as speakers. Furthermore, I hypothesize that the pragmatic
option of using the pronominal form
salirse, in contrast with
the absolute form
salir, has since the 16th century reflected
the constrained nature of socially acceptable or desirable behavior for
Mexican women.
The use of pronominal clitics with intransitive motion verbs, as in
La pelota se cayó de la mesa
‘The ball [se] fell off the table’ or
Se salió de la casa de su mamá cuando
tenía catorce años ‘She
[se] left her mom's house when she was
fourteen’, has been treated in diverse and often unsatisfactory
ways by linguists writing on clitic phenomena. These constructions have
been called “Romance reflexives” (García 1975), “inchoatives”
(Mendikoetxea 1999:1639), “middle
reflexives” (Klaiman 1992),
“obligatory reflexives” (Silva-Corvalán 1994:123; Gutiérrez &
Silva-Corvalán 1993:77, 84),
“refining se (se de matización)”
(Butt & Benjamin 2000:358),
“energetic constructions” (Maldonado 1999:353–98), or, as Maldonado (1999:398) notes, labeled as “exceptions,
deviations, or simply aberrations of Hispanic speech.”3
Quotations from Spanish-language sources are
translated by the author.
Because of the various and often
vague labels attached to these constructions, and the relatively little
attention they have received in the field, the numerous approaches to
this phenomenon leave much to be desired. As Maldonado points out,
“Traditional Hispanic grammars have held that the use of
se in intransitive constructions is either automatic or it is
trivialized to the point that the original expressive meaning of this
form is so tenuous that it is almost imperceptible”
(
1999:356).
Traditionally, as can be deduced from the majority of the labels
listed above, this use of the clitic has been understood as a type of
reflexive. García 1975 suggests that,
just as the use of the reflexive pronoun in transitive constructions
lowers the verb's transitivity and thus the number of arguments,
so too does its use with intransitives, making it impossible for the
hearer to interpret the action as having been caused by an outside
agent. The basic function of a reflexive is to
“[encode] … a referential identity between the
two theta-roles assigned by a transitive verb, Agent and Theme
(Patient)” (Klaiman 1992:38). As
Maldonado puts it,
There is a kind of shared consensus to analyze the
occurrence of the clitic se as a problem of unaccusativity. If
the ‘superficial’ object is represented by 2, that is, as
patient object in the ‘deep structure,’ the promotion of 2
to 1 motivates the occurrence of the form se.
(1999:377)
If this is the case, and se constructions with intransitive
motion verbs are to be considered a part of this category, then at
least two participants (agent and patient) must be identifiable. This,
however, is not possible for the types of constructions discussed here,
making this analysis highly inadequate.
Maldonado 1989, 1993, 1999 is the first
to offer a thorough and enlightening treatment of this topic. Rejecting
the idea that this is a simple problem of unaccusativity,
simplification, over-generalization, analogy, or loss of meaning, he
suggests instead that these are “energetic constructions”
that focus on the action, either by emphasizing the moment in which the
subject suffers a change of state, or by showing it to be against the
normal expectations or desires of the speaker (Maldonado 1999:353–62). Butt & Benjamin (2000:358–72) draw much of their analysis of
what they call the “refining se” from
Maldonado's approach. As Langacker 1994
and others (e.g. Maldonado 1999, Talmy 1985) have noted, these expectations may very
well be social or cultural: “Quite a number of grammatical
phenomena are in one way or another sensitive to cultural expectations.
They somehow reflect culturally determined conceptions of what
constitutes a familiar scenario, a canonical
situation, or a normal course of events” (Langacker
1994:39; emphasis in original).
The work done thus far on these constructions (and in construal
literature in general), however, has been based almost entirely on
invented or anecdotal examples. This kind of evidence does not allow
for exploration of patterns of variation in everyday language use, and
thus it can provide only a partial explanation of these
constructions' meanings. This essay, like other recent works,
considers the semantics of salirse as falling into an
energetic constructions framework, but I will test this hypothesis with
variationist methodology. It is only through the use of empirical data
and statistical analyses (cf. Diller & Khanittanan 2002:48; Barlow & Kemmer
2000) that we can develop a fuller understanding of both the
cognitive and the social processes that mold patterns of gender
variation in the use of salir(se).
CORPUS AND METHODOLOGY
This study includes data from two corpora: (i) the Documentos
lingüísticos de la Nueva España: Altiplano
central (Company Company 1994;
henceforth DLNE), a corpus of approximately 320 written documents
dating from 1535 to 1818, with a word count of approximately 260,000;
and (ii) El habla popular de la Ciudad de México: Materiales
para su estudio (Lope Blanch 1976), a
172,699-word corpus that includes guided interviews with one or two
informants, as well as a section of surreptitiously recorded
conversations, all done in Mexico City.4
I elected to work
with the DLNE due to the fact that these documents were chosen because
of their approximation to the spoken language of the time. As Company
Company, who compiled the corpus, notes:
The work is made up fundamentally of materials that are
colloquial in nature, that come a bit closer – inasmuch as
written language is a reflection of spoken language – to the
speech of the Mexican colonial period. Though it is difficult to define
the term ‘colloquial,’ and even more so for written
language, I selected documents that showed, it seemed to me, a more
fluid syntax. (1994:5)
Thus, though DLNE is a written corpus, it is not a literary corpus (a
collection of formal writing), and thus it does not necessarily reflect
only the trained writing of the more formally educated. The documents
in the DLNE are made up of four principal types: letters, court
testimonies, inventories and wills, and petitions and reports.5
For a detailed description of the documents
included, see Company Company 1994.
The majority of the court testimonies are transcriptions of the oral
testimonies of often illiterate citizens, and as such they are far more
representative than literary corpora that include only the writings of
literate elite males (cf. Seed
1988:10–11). With this in mind, it seems
appropriate also to examine the most representative corpus of modern
Mexican Spanish available:
El habla popular de la Ciudad de
México (
Lope Blanch 1976),
henceforth referred to as UNAM.
Table 1 shows
a summary of the documents used from the DLNE.
Summary of DLNE documents used by document type and race of author or
witness.
I counted and coded all occurrences of salir and
salirse in the DLNE and UNAM. In the DLNE, only documents that
had an occurrence of salir(se) were included, leaving a total
of 119 documents. The 16th-century DLNE corpus included 22 documents,
yielding 62 instances of salir(se). The 17th-century corpus
included 44 documents, with a total of 108 tokens. The 18th century
included 43 documents with 77 tokens, and the 19th century had 10
documents and 14 tokens. The 20th-century UNAM corpus yielded a total
of 289 occurrences of salir(se). Once the tokens were
extracted, each was coded according to the independent variables of
aspect, person, clause type, parallel processing, referent
sex/animacy, referent number, and semantic context. Owing to the
low number of tokens for the 16th through 19th centuries, detailed
statistical analysis was not used on these occurrences. For the
20th-century data, however, GoldVarb 2001, a multiple regression
variable-rule analysis program, was used to analyze the data, the results
of which are given in the following section.6
For
more information on GoldVarb, see Rand & Sankoff 1990.
RESULTS
Before moving on to the gendered ways in which salir(se)
variation is manifested in Mexican speech, we must first establish that
the use of the pronominal form is, in fact, optional. Synchronically,
the pronominal form can be used, even prescriptively, in various
contexts. Below is the 2001 Diccionario de la Real Academia
Española (henceforth DRAE) definition for this form7
The Diccionario del español usual
de México (Lara Ramos 1996:802)
offers a similar, though less complete, definition of salirse,
giving two meanings: 1) “to discontinue a certain behavior, line
of action, or function, certain procedure: salirse del tema
‘change the topic,’ salirse de la norma
‘stray from the norm,’ salirse del carril
‘go out of the lane;’” and 2) “for a liquid to
pass the limits of what contains it, or for what contains it to have
some rupture through which the liquid passes….” This
dictionary also gives a definition for the phrase salirse con la
suya, which is defined as “To do as one wishes against what
seems fitting to others.”
:
- intransitive. Pass from inside to outside. Salió de la
casa a las ocho ‘She left the house at eight’. Used
also as pronominal.
- intransitive. Show or initiate something unexpectedly. Salir
con la pretensión, con la demanda, con la amenaza
‘Come out with the pretension, the lawsuit, the threat’.
Used also as pronominal.
- intransitive. Move away from or separate oneself from something or
be lacking in it in what is necessary or due. Salió de la
regla, de tono ‘He went against the rule, the tone’.
Used also as pronominal.
- pronominal. Said of the contents of a container: To spill due to a
crack or break. El agua se salió del vaso ‘The
water spilled out of the glass’.
- pronominal. Said of a liquid: Boil over. Se ha salido la
leche ‘The milk has boiled over’.
- pronominal. Said of a container or depository: To have some crack
or break through which the contents spill. Este cántaro se
sale ‘This container spills’.
- pronominal. In some games, to do the moves or plays necessary to
win.
- pronominal. archaic. Initiate intervention in a fight or a cause
either as a fiscal or as a party.
As we can see, the prescriptive use of salirse falls into two
basic categories: unexpected (either physically or socially deviating from
the expected or desired order of events, as in definitions 2–6), and
not unexpected (definitions 1, 7, and 8). As Maldonado
1999 notes, this construction can be used to signal the subjective
experience or interpretation of the speaker, indicating that the event or
action was against her (or society's) expectations. He also correctly
points out that “expectations are based on our knowledge about the
canonical structure of world events, behavioral patterns of society and
other kinds of norms. Events contradicting our world view are thus
prompt to have negative connotations” (Maldonado 1993:549). The unexpected uses can be
further understood as made up of both physically abnormal (4–6)
and socially abnormal (2 and 3) events. Uses fitting definitions
1–6 all appear in my data, though not always in the pronominal
form. I also found that salirse was sometimes used in contexts
other than these six possibilities: with abrupt movements (included in
tables with ‘unexpected’) and with permanent abandonment.
The context of leaving an organization, which is the context most cited
in recent literature (e.g. Silva-Corvalán
1994) as one in which the use of the pronominal form is obligatory,
occurred only once in the data (indeed, in the pronominal form). Because
of its relatively low frequency and semantic proximity to the noncontrastive
‘leave’, this occurrence was included in the ‘leave’
category. Furthermore, there were two larger semantic categories in which
the pronominal form was never used: to end up or turn out, and to cost, as
seen in example (1).8
These correspond to
definitions 10, 18, 26, 27, 29 and 36, and 17 and 19 of DRAE 2001, respectively.
These two meanings are
related, in that ‘cost’ could also be understood as a particular
type of ‘ending up’. It is unclear why the pronominal form has
not yet extended to these meanings in these data, but it has been found to be
used in the ‘end up’ context, albeit rarely, in northern New
Mexican Spanish (
Aaron 2003).
9 The extension of the use of the pronominal form in this context
in New Mexico could be due to an acceleration of an internal change, in this
case of salirse extension, resulting from the situation of
contact with English (see Silva-Corvalán
1994).
10 Examples will be cited in the
following manner: (Corpus document/page, year).
All other categories showed variation in clitic use, shown in Table 215
All p
values given, except in Table 3, were obtained
through chi-square tests.
.
Proportion of pronominal forms by semantic context in 20th century.
All differences between salir and salirse within each
semantic context are significant at p < .01, except Cost
(p = .0831) and Permanent abandonment (p = .0172). All
differences between semantic contexts are significant at p <
.01, except Turn out/Leave (p = .0674), Cost/Leave
(p = .3353), and Cost/Permanent abandonment (p =
.0145).
In order to explore the possible influence of other factors on the
use of the pronominal form salirse in the 20th century, I
subjected the data to multiple regression analysis using GoldVarb; the
results can be seen in Table 3. GoldVarb is a
computerized statistical program that allows the comparison of the
influence of numerous noninteracting factors on a particular variable.
Within each factor group – for example, semantic context –
each factor must present variation. If a factor does not present variation
in the dependent variable, then it must be excluded from analysis. This was
the case, for example, with the semantic context of ‘cost’ (see
ex. 1) in these data: It occurred only with salir, never with
salirse. The removal of nonvariable factors is an important
part of the analysis, for it ensures a greater likelihood of the
correct identification of the hierarchy of constraints that affect the
dependent variable only in contexts in which either variant of the
dependent variable, in this case salir or salirse,
could possibly be chosen.
GoldVarb results with pronominal form as application value (20th
century). Factor groups not selected as significant: aspect,
grammatical person, referent sex/animacy, referent number, speaker
age, interview type. p = 0.012
Once nonvariable factors have been removed, the researcher must
select an application value, which is one of the two variants of the
dependent variable. In this case, I chose salirse.11
Had I chosen salir, GoldVarb would
have produced the mirror image of Table 2,
with those factors that favor disfavoring and vice versa, but with the
same factor groups selected as significant and in the same
order.
Once this is done, GoldVarb selects the factor groups
that have a statistically significant effect on the dependent variable.
Each factor is given a weight between 0 and 1, such that any weight
above 0.5 favors the use of the application value, while any weight
below 0.5 disfavors it. The further the weight is from 0.5, the
stronger the effect of this factor. These weights determine the
hierarchy of constraints, the “grammar,” so to speak
(Poplack & Tagliamonte
2001:92–93),
underlying
salir(se) variation. Each factor group, in turn,
has a range of factor weights, determined by subtracting the weight of
the lowest factor in the group from that of the highest. For semantic
context, for example, the range is 97 minus 28, or 69. These ranges
show the magnitude of the effect of a factor group on the dependent
variable: The higher the range, the stronger the effect of that factor
group. In my data, the semantic context group was the most influential,
with a range of 69, compared to the weakest significant factor group,
parallel processing, with a range of 37. In this study, factors not
selected as significant for the 20th century include aspect, person,
referent sex/animacy, referent number, speaker age, and interview
type.
Besides inherent variation in nearly all semantic contexts, another
reason to believe that the use of the pronominal form is indeed a
pragmatic option not determined by semantics alone is that it appears
significantly more often in main clauses than the bare form does. In
Table 3, we can see that main clauses favor
clitic occurrence with a weight of 0.61, and subordinate clauses
strongly disfavor the clitic, with a weight of 0.22.12
Note that the GoldVarb results, with a p value of
.012, did not reach statistical significance at the .01 level, but did
at a .05 level, most likely owing to the small sample size. The term
“parallel processing,” for this study, refers to presence
of the same or the same expected clitic within the preceding two
clauses.
Yet another factor pointing to the optional nature of clitic use is
the statistically significant effect of parallel processing in
contemporary data. Poplack 1980 found that
the elision of /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish was strongly favored
by the elision of the previous /s/, and even more so by the
elision of the previous two /s/s'. She called this
phenomenon a “parallel processing effect” (Poplack 1980). Pereira Scherre (2001:91), who stresses the importance of
“consider[ing] preceding markers across linear position
as well as other important constraints,” found similar results in
her study of /s/ aspiration and elision in Brazilian
Portuguese.
For these data, I considered this same effect, counting as a possible
source of parallel processing the presence of the same clitic form
(with or without the same referent) as the one possible with
salir(se) within the last two clauses of speech. I did not
count discourse markers such as tú sabes ‘you
know’ as independent clauses. In Table
3, we can see that this effect is statistically significant in
the 20th-century data. The presence of the same form in the two
preceding clauses favors the occurrence of the pronominal form
salirse with a weight of 0.79, while its absence disfavors
salirse with a weight of 0.42.13
In a recent study, which included ir(se)
‘to go’, salir(se), venir(se) ‘to
come’, bajar(se) ‘to descend’,
subir(se) ‘to ascend’, quedar(se)
‘to stay’ and caer(se) ‘to fall’,
Aaron 2003 found a similar effect with these
constructions in northern New Mexican Spanish.
This shows that
not only semantic and syntactic factors, but also the properties of the
surrounding discourse, play a role in the speaker's choice to use
a clitic.
Speaker sex and clitic variation
Now that we have sufficiently established that the
pronominal/absolute choice is a true choice, we may consider it as
a tool that differently gendered speakers may use in different ways,
either qualitatively or quantitatively, in order to achieve the desired
pragmatic effect. As shown in Table 4, women
in the 20th-century sample used significantly more pronominal forms
than men did. A total of 69% of all salirse occurrences were
produced by female speakers. Furthermore, while men chose the
pronominal form only 10% of the time, women chose it 24% of the
time.
Pronominal use by speaker sex. Differences between female and male
are significant at p = .0013.
These totals in themselves, however, tell us relatively little about
how women and men are using this pronominal form. Does women's
elevated use happen only in certain semantic or pragmatic contexts?
Does one sex favor contexts that do not seem to allow variation? For
this study, occurrences were divided into five semantic categories: (i)
to cost, (ii) unexpected, (iii) permanent abandonment, (iv) to leave
(noncontrastive with the nonpronominal form, with no apparent semantic
value beyond the basic semantics of the verb), and (v) to turn out or
end up. Examples 2–4 below provide instances of tokens in each
category in which the pronominal form occurred. Examples for
nonvariable contexts ‘cost’ and ‘turn out/end
up’ can be found in (1) above.
In Table 5, we can see that men do indeed
seem to speak more about contexts in which variation does not occur.
Though the total occurrence of salir(se) for women and men is
about equal, at 149 and 140 tokens respectively, men win out in the
nonvariable contexts, producing 55% of the ‘turn out’
tokens, and a whopping 93% of the ‘cost’ tokens. Women, on
the other hand, win out in two of the large variable contexts,
producing 59% of the ‘permanent’ tokens, and 68% of the
‘unexpected’ tokens. Both sexes were about even in their
production of ‘leave tokens.’
Cross-tabulation of speaker sex and semantic context. No differences
between male and female speakers within semantic context significant at
p < .01, except Cost. For Unexpected context, p =
.0127.
These semantic context preferences, however, do not tell the whole
story. Women, within each variable context, favored the pronominal form
more than men did in the same context. As Table
6 indicates, in the ‘permanent’ context, women used
the clitic 44% of the time, while men used it only 18% of the time.
Again, in the ‘unexpected’ context, women use the
pronominal form 88% of the time, compared to men's 67%. Women show
almost no difference from men in the use of the pronominal form in the
‘leave’ context, producing it only 1% more than men.
Cross-tabulation of clitic use by speaker sex and semantic context.
No sex differences in use of salirse by semantic context
significant at p < .01.
Why would women, speaking about the same semantic context as men,
choose to use the pronominal form so much more often? A possible
explanation for the elevated frequency of salirse in women's
speech could be that they tend to have different topics of conversation
than men. This does appear to be the case, as can be seen in Table 7. Here, we see that, while men were most likely
to talk about inanimate objects (48% of all men's tokens), women were
most likely to talk about women (36% of all women's tokens).
Furthermore, men produced 69% of the inanimate referents and 67% of the
masculine referents, and women produced 96% of the female referents.
Only with animate (sex unknown) referents were the percentages for each
sex about equal.
Cross-tabulation of speaker sex and referent animacy/sex. All
differences between female and male speakers within referent animacy
significant at p < .01, except Animate (p =
.4762).
In Table 8, we can see that inanimates are
the referent group least likely to take the pronominal form, at 9%,
followed by animates at 11%, masculine referents at 25%, and feminine
referents at 32%. Differences in topic choice, again, then, may
partially explain the elevated relative frequency of salirse
in women's speech. Interestingly, however, as we see in Table 8, women still produce more pronominal forms
than men within the same category of inanimate, animate, and feminine
referents. Only with masculine referents do men have a slight tendency
to use the pronominal form more often than women.
Cross-tabulation of clitic use by speaker sex and referent animacy/sex.
No differences between male and female speakers in use of salirse
by referent animacy are significant at p < .01, except
Inanimate. No differences between referent types in clitic reference
are significant at p < .01, except Inanimate/Masculine,
Inanimate/Feminine, and Animate/Feminine.
Social meanings
Thus far, we have seen that neither semantic context nor topic choice
alone is an adequate explanation for the elevated use of the pronominal
form by women. Given this fact, a pragmatic explanation would perhaps
be the most plausible, especially given the pragmatic possibilities
offered by energetic constructions such as salirse. Why, then,
within this framework, would both female speakers and female referents
exhibit such an elevated occurrence of the pronominal/energetic
form? Let us look at a few examples with female referents and speakers
from the UNAM corpus, shown in (5):
In these examples, we can see clearly the social implications of
salirse, in which the female subject has done something
displeasing to a higher authority of some sort, in these cases either a
male lover or a parent. This context, of course, also happens with male
subjects, but much less frequently. In (6), for example, the subject is
male, though he is not a full-grown man but a boy:
Here, again, the pronominal form is used to indicate purposeful
violation of authoritarian expectations, and it implies social and
physical repercussions for this violation. Though this context with
salirse is used for referents of both sexes, salirse
in general is much more common with female referents (see Table 8).
As Maldonado notes, “The fact that se is used to mark
some type of accidentality has been well pointed out in the relevant
literature (Real Academia Española
1978, Benot 1910, Molina Redondo 1974, Moliner
1966, García 1975, Maldonado 1989)” (1993:531). Similarly, Schmitz argues that “the
se me, se le construction is used with involuntary
physiological or emotional reactions” (Schmitz
1966:431). Not surprisingly, then, this is the only contrastive
semantic category that has been present since the 16th century in the
texts I examined. Example (7) provides instances of this category for
each time period, excluding the 19th century, which, owing to the
extremely small size of the corpus, does not present any occurrences of
salirse being used with this context:
These examples are, in fact, the prototypical example for what
Maldonado 1989, 1993, 1999 terms
“energetic constructions.” In energetic constructions, the
expectations of the speaker play a part in the formation of the
construction. In this case, the pronominal form is used when an event
is either undesired or unexpected. A typical example of this phenomenon
is with the verb caer(se) ‘to fall.’ If a ball
falls off a table, it is most common to say La pelota se
cayó de la mesa ‘The ball
[se] fell off the table’. If, on the other
hand, a ball falls from the hoop in a basketball game, an expected
event perfectly natural according to physical laws, no clitic is
typically used: La pelota cayó de la
canasta ‘The ball [Ø] fell from the
basket’ (Maldonado 1999).
In (7) above, the events described go against societal norms and thus
are unexpected, though each case may have been anticipated by the
speaker. This type of unexpectedness could be considered a social
manifestation of what Talmy 1985 and
Maldonado frame in physical terms as a “force dynamic”:
For changes to be able to take place, some type of energy
must act on a determined element. Before the action takes place there
can be some type of resistance that controls the state of the element
that will be affected. This creates a situation of force
dynamic, as Talmy (1985) proposes, in
which the energetic element (the antagonist) imposes a change
in another element (the agonist) by blocking or abating the
force with which the element remained in a particular state, before the
energy acted on it … . In this type of energetic construction
there can also be an abstract confrontation of a force dynamic. In
general terms, the natural expectations regarding different events in
the world constitute the initial force which a specific event
confronts. (Maldonado 1999:375)
As Maldonado notes, “The expectations [of the
speaker] are based on the knowledge shared by a community about
the canonical structure of world events, social behavioral norms, and
other types of norms” (1999:380). A social
interpretation of the use of the pronominal form in cases like those shown in
(7) offers the clearest explanation, as well as a prototypical example of the
energetic construction.
A diachronic perspective
The socially deviant context, as mentioned above, is the only one to
appear in these data since the 16th century. Yet another reason to
believe that the energetic construction with salirse was
already present in the 16th century is that this – and only this
– meaning is attested in the 1611 version of Tesoro de la
lengua Castellana o Española (Covarrubias
1943:922). Here, salirse, listed together with the lexical
entry salir, is used in the following way: “for a glass to
salirse means it spills; salirse out of what has been
established, to have regrets; salirse from the religion,
renounce the habit.” This meaning is even clearer in the RAE
usual 1780 (Real Academia Española
1780), which includes the following contrastive definitions:
Salir con la suya. To get what one attempts to,
when there are barriers to accomplish it. In contentione vincere,
voti compotem evadere.
Salirse con la suya. Stay stubbornly in one's
point of view or behavior against the advice and desires of others.
Contra ceterorum vota persistere, perseverare.
The second definition, which uses the pronominal form, contrasts with
the first in that a social and moral implication is given to the
action. Another piece of evidence for the established social/moral
meaning of salirse can be found in the RAE usual 1791
(Real Academia Española 1791), which
has an entry for the following proverb:
Salíme al sol, dixe mal, y oí peor.
‘I went out [me] into the sun, I said bad, and
I heard worse.’
The definition for this entry says, “Refrain that denounces
meetings and get-togethers in which things are whispered and outside
groups are censured, and recommends staying inside and modesty.”
The contradiction of social norms context appears to be both a very
early and a quite widespread use of the pronominal form, and it has
continued as such up to the present day. The current popular expression
te sales ‘you exaggerate, you're going over the
top’ is another example of this use. Synchronically, the socially
deviant/unexpected context is the one that most favors the use of
the clitic, with a GoldVarb factor weight of 0.97 (see Table 3).
Given the common social implications of salirse, it is
interesting to note in quantitative terms the gendered way in which it
has been used diachronically: it tends to refer to female behaviors and
actions. This tendency is strikingly evident in a definition for
salirse taken from the 1959 Diccionario de
mejicanismos (Santamaría 1959:956, emphasis mine):
- Salirse, pronominal. For a woman to abandon the
family house.
- Salirse uno del huacal, figurative expression. Take an
aggressive attitude, lose patience, lack due composure.
- Salirse del fuste, Said of an excessively provocative and
dishonest woman who insinuates more to a man than is
appropriate.
Remarkably, of the three uses of salirse listed in this
dictionary, two of them are said to refer specifically to women. The
data too show a consistently elevated level of use with animate female
referents. As is shown in Table 9, the
likelihood that a female referent will be involved in a
salirse construction is higher than that for all other
referents in my sample since the 16th century. One possibility is that
this favoring of female referents could occur because, as women's
behavior in Mexico is more strictly regulated and controlled than
men's (and has been for many centuries in Western and many other
cultures), they are more likely to be seen as overstepping social norms
or expectations. In colonial New Spain, patriarchalism, though not
monolithic, “was a powerful and persuasive ideology in society at
large,” and served as the “dominant metaphor for a variety
of hierarchies … that were organized upon the principles of
patrons and clients and cut across social and ethnic boundaries”
(Seed 1988:7). Women were, of course, divided
by factors of race and class, and what was expected of a lady of the
nobility was certainly different in both qualitative and quantitative
terms from what was expected of a slave or servant (Gonzalbo 1985:12).
Use of salirse as percentage of total salir(se) tokens
by century according to referent sex and animacy. Differences between
male and female referents are significant at p < .01 for 16th
and 17th centuries. All other differences are not significant. Animate and
Inanimate figures, due to the dearth of tokens, were not tested for
significance.
The world of women in New Spain was not static; as the ideals and
exigencies of those with influence and power changed, so did the face
of patriarchy (Gonzalbo 1985:12). Despite
these differences and societal transformations, however, women across
ethnic and class groups, and even across centuries, were united by the
experience of patriarchal repression in its varied manifestations
(Arenal & Schlau 1989:1; Gonzalbo 1985:12; Schlau 1996:183;
Seed 1988:7). This force was often most clearly
seen in ideals articulated in documents produced by colonial authorities,
such as Inquisition documents like those in the DLNE. In these and other
documents of the time, women were expected to be submissive to their
husbands and superiors (Gonzalbo 1985:12),
silent (Chinchilla 1996), secluded (Arenal & Schlau 1989:1), and inactive in public
life and public spaces (Chinchilla 1996:37;
Gonzalbo 1985:13). Along with social spaces,
women's physical spaces were also limited:
Physical space in the home was extremely confined during
this period [the16th, 17th, and 18th centuries]. A room of
one's own was to be found only in some monastic cells. The
quarters allotted to women, even in the homes of the nobility, were
often cramped and easily accessible to men of the family and male
servants. All domestic space was shared. Women were not allowed in all
rooms and frequently had only cushions, not chairs, to sit on. Both the
objects in the home and the women themselves belonged to the men.
(Arenal & Schlau 1989:3)
These restrictions on the ideal woman's physical and social
behavior produced in the literature “a social subject always in
hiding, multifaceted and reticent, that almost never is revealed upon a
first reading and that inhabits primarily the margins and lives in
between the lines of masculine discourses” (Moraña 1996:8). These ideals had an enormous
effect on how the behaviors and activities of real women in colonial
Spanish America were perceived:
The living and discursive space of the colonial woman was
always a limited confine controlled by strategies and rhetorics that
assigned to her precise and unavoidable values and functions destined
to confirm and strengthen the place of Power…. For this reason
as well, her activity is always seen as transgressive, limited and
belligerent, her modus operandi as allegorical, reticent or
paradoxical, and her achievements like the tip of an iceberg whose base
is sunk in the dark waters of a history that, like the riches of
America, became foreign before it could begin to be her own.
(Moraña 1996:7–8)
Despite the hegemonic nature of these discourses, it is a mistake to
assume that these attempts at social and physical control of
women's lives were always, or even mostly, successful; in
practice, women were not always bound to these ideals. In fact, rich
and impoverished women alike were often active in public life,
including commerce, religion, and recreation (Gonzalbo 1985:13–14). However, since women in colonial
Spanish America were less likely than men to be literate (Arenal & Schlau 1989), and their writings
mostly remain unpublished, our access to the words and stories of these
women is often not direct – it is often mediated by the pen of
the literate males who transcribed women's words in documents like
those in the DLNE. By both asking the questions and having ultimate
control over the written product, male transcribers in the Inquisition
maintained their hegemony, and through their language we find “as
much revealed about social norms and hopes for each sex as in religious
papers and dogma” (Schlau 1996:183).
In modern Mexico, these discourses have not disappeared (Boyer 1991:271). Pacheco Ladrón de Guevara
(1993:32) invokes the laments of colonial
poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to describe the situation of
women in the State of Mexico today, who, she argues, face injustice and
inequality in employment, health, and education. Olivera
Campirán (1992:274) notes that the few
woman-dominated professional careers in Mexico State, such as secretary
and model, are service-oriented, and “follow a model derived from
patriarchal ideology and a work decision that is biological in nature,
through which women are assigned to activities ‘proper to their
sex.’”
“Proper” activities for Mexican women may continue to be
more limited than for their male counterparts. In a study on the
concept of female mental illness in modern Mexican society, Lagarriga
Attias (1996:89) argues that “through
the conceptions of mental illness suffered by women, we can better
comprehend the images our culture creates about the nature of the
feminine condition.” Noting an elevated incidence of insanity
among women (versus men) in Mexican society, Lagarriga Attias suggests
that this may be due to the fact that women are not allowed to ignore
their social obligations and duties as women, and that, in all social
classes, Mexican women are born into a culture in which to be a woman
is to be devalued (Lagarriga Attias
1996:90).
The tendency in colonial and modern Spanish to use salirse
to refer to women's actions appears to be yet another articulation
of these patriarchal ideals and limitations, though less obvious and,
because of this, perhaps more pervasive. It seems, however, that these
gender differences in salirse use may be leveling out –
perhaps owing to a change in hegemonic discourse, or perhaps owing to
differences in the nature of the data; male referents slowly gained in
relative frequency, and inanimates appeared as possible referents for
the first time in my data from the 20th century.14
The possibility of inanimate referents, however, does seem
to go back to the beginning of the energetic-absolute contrast with
salir(se), as evidenced by the 1611 dictionary definition
(Covarrubias 1943), in which salirse
can also mean ‘to spill’. I found no evidence of this use,
however, in the DLNE, perhaps owing to the infrequency of this context
in the situations discussed in the documents examined.
