Expressing Personal Taste in Mexican Spanish

Abstract:

Do the social meanings of individual component parts (e.g., super → young, cool → casual ) carry over to structurally complex linguistic expressions (e.g., super cool → young and casual) or do they accrue social meanings of their own? How do such expressions fare against structurally different alternatives applicable to the same situation (e.g.,super cool vs magnificent)? In this dissertation, I address these questions through an examination of highly positive evaluations of food in Mexican Spanish (e.g., está bien bueno ‘it’s really good’ vs es delicioso ‘it’s delicious’). Drawing on data from sociolinguistic interviews and online cooking shows, I examine the linguistic, contextual, and social factors that condition the variation associated with the use of copulas, intensifiers, and predicates of personal taste that make up these constructions. Across three studies, I show that while speakers' production patterns generally align with semantic and pragmatic expectations, speakers differ socially in the extent to which they do so. I argue that speakers capitalize on the indexical associations and pragmatic inferences drawn from different component parts to project different culinary personae. In doing so, their linguistic choices both draw on and contribute to the enregisterment of these features as distinctively characteristic of different figures of personhood in the cooking domain (e.g., professional chefs, domestic cooks). Taken together, these findings advance a unified account in which the social meanings of linguistic expressions assumed to be in variation are shaped not only by how they relate to other expressions semantically, structurally, and socially, but also by how those relations are made legible as distinct within stylistic practice.