Claudia Parodi

Modeling the speech community: Configuration and variable types in the Mexican Spanish setting

This article proposes a comprehensive model of the speech community in sociolinguistics that reworks Labov’s model, which has been criticized as being restrictive. Fieldwork in non-metropolitan Mexico demonstrates the utility of our model, which can be applied across both urban and non-urban domains. It is compatible with the Milroys’ central mechanism for the description of individual speech usage and group cohesion or susceptibility to change in terms of the social network. Based on linguistic variable types, this model has a hierarchy of four nested fields (speech community configurations) into which each individual is placed, according to his/her demonstrated recognition of the social evaluation associated with the variables. At the most local configuration, speakers demonstrate no knowledge of generally stigmatized variables; in the second, speakers register an awareness of stigmatized variables; in the third, an awareness of stigmatized and regional variables; and in the fourth, speakers model standard variants over regional ones. This model classifies the kinds of sociolinguistic variables that are pertinent in this social setting and also provides a structured manner for dealing with dialect contact dynamics. (Speech community, social network, Spanish, Mexico, dialect, diffusion, variables.)* We present here a model of dialect contact in order to capture Spanish dialect distribution in contemporary Mexico, as this ranges from provincial and regional Mexican Spanish to standard Mexican Spanish. To account for the principal finding of our fieldwork ‐ that a subset of members of the same community do not share crucial aspects of the evaluation of language variation with the majority ‐

Nahuatl Theater, Volume 4: Nahua Christianity in Performance (review)

on indigenous theater in the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain. Parodi’s piece examines Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlixóchitl’s translation of Spanish Golden Age drama, in particular that of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. She finds that Alva Ixtlixóchitl did more than simply translate the pieces; he also adapted them to fit into the evangelization theater to which the Nahuas of central Mexico were accustomed. Aracil provides important insight into an area that has been largely neglected: Andean evangelization theater. While her aim is to understand how the play “Usca Paucar” developed from the tradition of the Medieval exemplum, the article is also important for further understanding indigenous life and evangelization in the Andes. The role of women in theater is also examined. The piece by Pilar Latasa, “La promesa de una ‘farsanta,’” is a good example. Using a seventeenth century judicial case between María Torres and Diego Muñoz del Castillo regarding marital transgressions, Latasa examines the reputation of actresses in colonial society. She found that what the actresses did on stage was used against them in legal cases.