THE PRESEEA CORPUS APPLIED TO LANGUAGE TEACHING: THE EXPRESSION OF THE PRONOMINAL SUBJECT

Abstract

The consideration of the conditioning factors in the expression of the pronominal subject in Spanish and how to teach this issue to foreign students is a recurring topic in linguistics studies. In particular, the difficulties that many learners, especially English speakers, have when acquiring a foreign parameter as is the case with null subjects. In this paper, after a brief review of some studies on the acquisition of pronominal subjects in Spanish, we propose a new approach based on variationist linguistics, more specifically on the studies carried out by the PRESEEA group teams in different places in the Hispanic world. We explain the factors that this group, using statistical techniques, considers most significant in the presence of the pronominal subject and, according to them, we make a didactic proposal that may be used by students of Spanish as a foreign language.