Languages In the World by Julie Tetel Andresen, Phillip M. Carter Read Free Book Online Page A

these Indo-European structural tendencies are exceptions to the ways most languages of the world go about their grammatical business, and so we end our review of Spanglish by describing one such exception. In English and in Spanish, the marking of the syntactic relation of possession is put on what is called the dependent noun: in the phrase the man 's house and la casa del hombre the possessive morpheme -s is bound to the word man , and the possessive form del is determined by the gender of hombre . In a language like Hungarian, which belongs to the Uralic language stock, the possessive relationship is marked on what is called the head noun: az ember haz a , where az is ‘the,’ ember is ‘man,’ and haz is ‘house.’ The final -a on haz ‘house’ marks the possession:
Dependent (Possessor) Marking
Head (Thing Possessed) Marking
the man+s house
az ember haz+a
the man+possesses house
the man house+belongs to man
la casa del hombre
the house possessed+by man
    In other words, in Hungarian the thing possessed bears the grammatical mark of possession, not the possessor, and it turns out that the Hungarian pattern is the more common one among the languages of the world. To speakers of Indo-European languages this grammatical preference might seem strange. It might also seem to be relatively insignificant. However, marking preferences are structural features, as we will see in later chapters, with large implications.
Final Note: The Encounter of Spanish and English on Television in the United States
    From the earliest days of television in the United States, Spanish was heard in American living rooms through the character of Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy . He was played by Desi Arnaz, the real-life husband of Lucille Ball, who was the star of the show. Ricky/Desi was a bandleader of Cuban origin whose catchphrase was, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!” 10 Indeed, Lucy's antics would regularly exasperate him enough to send him off into a rant in Spanish. The sight of a handsome Latin man losing his temper with his wife while spouting a stream of incomprehensible speech always played for laughs. The comedy arising from the Spanish–English language gap is in evidence 50 years later on Modern Family whose character, Gloria Pritchett, played by Colombian bombshell, Sofia Vergara, regularly mangles English pronunciation to comic effect.
    If Spanish is treated as an object of amused incomprehension on English-language American sitcoms, how is English portrayed on Spanish-language American programs? On the Telemundo channel, owned by NBC Universal and broadcast throughout the United States, one popular telenovela , Marido en Alquiler , 11 has a character named Doña Teresa Cristina Palmer de Ibarra with la nariz respingada ‘nose in the air.’ She is apt to say things like, “Good morning, disculpen pero no me gusta decir buenos días en español .” (Good morning, excuse me but I don't like to say ‘good morning’ in Spanish.) ‘Good morning’ and buenos días are on the one hand equivalent salutations that perform the same social function, namely, a morning greeting. But Doña Teresa Cristina's use of the English ‘Good morning’ while otherwise speaking Spanish indicates that in the United States, the languages are not equal in terms of social status. While many Spanish speakers in the United States feel proud to speak Spanish, many nevertheless feel that English conveys a higher social status.
    The actors who play the lead protagonists on this telenovela also embody a European physical preference. They have light skin and light eyes, and they come from Venezuela, Colombia, and Argentina, although they do not speak their regional varieties on the show. Rather, they use a nonspecific variety with an occasional mix of Mexican slang so that their speech will appeal to the broadest segment of the viewing audience, namely the