Cover not available
Part of
Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: Selected papers from the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2015
Edited by Jonathan E. MacDonald
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15] 2018
► pp. 333–354

Chapter 15
An initial examination of imperfect subjunctive variation in Catalonian Spanish

A contact linguistics and usage-based approach

| Indiana University
While most Romance languages have only one morphological form for the imperfect subjunctive, Spanish exhibits variation between two morphological paradigms: -ra and -se. The present study investigated the distribution of these forms according to linguistic factors in Catalonian Spanish, a variety in close contact with Catalan. A corpus of 1,075 imperfect subjunctive tokens was compiled from the letters to the editor section of the regional newspaper La Vanguardia. Results show that the overall distribution of -se is slightly higher than what has been reported for European Spanish. Furthermore, a multivariate analysis revealed that structural priming, the existence of a cognate verb in Catalan and the combination of local frequency and morphological irregularity in the imperfect subjective significantly favor the use of -se.
Keywords: Catalonian Spanish, morphosyntax variation, variationist sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, usage-based linguistics, cognates, structural priming
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1The Spanish imperfect subjunctive
    • 2.2The effects of cognates and structural priming
    • 2.3Theoretical frameworks
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.15.16mck
References (53)
References
Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua. (2006). Gramàtica normativa valenciana. Valencia, Spain: Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua.Google Scholar
Amengual, M. (2012). Interlingual influence in bilingual speech: Cognate status effect in a continuum of bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 517–530. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Asratián, A. (2007). Variación -ra/-se en el español hablado en Caracas. Boletín de Lingüística, 19, 5–41.Google Scholar
Bernolet, S., Hartsuiker, R. J., & Pickering, M. J. (2012). Effects of phonological feedback on the selection of syntax: Evidence from between-language syntactic priming. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 503–516. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2008). The variable expression of future tense in Peninsular Spanish: The present (and future) of inflectional forms in the Spanish spoken in a bilingual region. Language Variation and Change, 20, 85–126.Google Scholar
(2011). Spanish in contact with Catalan. In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.), The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics (pp. 374–394). Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blas Arroyo, J. L., & Porcar Miralles, M. (1994). Empleo de las formas – ray -se en las comunidades de habla castellonenses. Aproximación sociolingüística. Español Actual, 62, 73–98.Google Scholar
Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355–387. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bolinger, D. L. (1956). Subjunctive -ra and -se: “Free variation”? Hispania, 39, 345–349. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, E. L. (2015). The role of discourse context frequency in phonological variation: A usage-based approach to bilingual speech production. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19, 387–406. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, E. L., & Amengual, M. (2015). Fine-grained and probabilistic cross-linguistic influences in the pronunciation of cognates: Evidence from corpus-based spontaneous conversation and experimentally elicited data. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 8, 59–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, E. L., & Harper, D. (2009). Phonological evidence of interlingual exemplar connections. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 2, 257–274. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2006). From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language, 82, 711–733. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2010). Language usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron, R., & Flores-Ferrán, N. (2003). Perseveration of subject expression across regional dialects of Spanish. Spanish in Context, 1, 41–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collantine, J. (2010). The acquisition and teaching of the Spanish subjunctive: An update on current findings. Hispania, 93, 39–51.Google Scholar
Costa, A., Caramazza, A., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2000). The cognate facilitation effect: Implications for models of lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 26, 1283–1296.Google Scholar
Croft, W. (2000). Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Pearson.Google Scholar
Davidson, J. (2015). Social dynamics of Catalan-Spanish contact in the evolution of Catalonian Spanish. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
Davies, M. (2006). A frequency dictionary of Spanish. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
de Groot, A. M. (1992). Determinants of word translation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18, 1001–1018.Google Scholar
de Groot, A. M., Dannenburg, L., & Van Hell, J. G. (1994). Forward and backward word translation by bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 33,600–629. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DeMello, G. (1993). -Ra vs. -se subjunctive: A new look at an old topic. Hispania, 76, 235–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dijkstra, A., Grainger, J., & Van Heuven, W. J. B. (1999). Recognition of cognates and interlingual homographs: The neglected role of phonology. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 496–518. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enrique-Arias, A. (2010). On language contact as an inhibitor of language change: The Spanish of Catalan bilinguals in Majorca. In A. Breitbarth, C. Lucas, S. Watts, & D. Willis (Eds.), Continuity and change in grammar (pp. 97–118). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erker, D., & Guy, G. R. (2012). The role of lexical frequency in syntactic variability: Variable subject personal pronoun expression in Spanish. Language, 88, 526–557. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flett, S., Branigan, H. P., & Pickering, M. J. (2013). Are non-native structural preferences affected by native language preferences? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 751–760. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, B. S. (1995). The -ra and -se opposition in Spanish. In E. Contini-Morava, & B. S. Goldberg (Eds.), Meaning as explanation: Advances in linguistic sign theory (pp. 381–404). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Graham, M. W. (1926). The imperfect subjunctive in Spanish America. Hispania, 9, 46–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gries, S. T. (2005). Syntactic priming: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 34, 365–399. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guzmán Naranjo, M. (2017). The se-ra alternation in Spanish subjunctive. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 13, 97–134. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Gramàtica de la llengua catalana. Retrieved February 20, 2014, from <[URL]>
Johnson, D. E. (2009). Getting off the Goldvarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3, 359–383. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kempas, I. (2011). Sobre la variación en el marco de la libre elección entre cantaray cantaseen el español peninsular. Moenia, 17, 243–264.Google Scholar
Kim, Y., & McDonough, K. (2008). Learners’ production of passives during syntactic priming activities. Applied Linguistics, 29, 149–154. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lemon, F. B. (1925). The relative frequency of the subjunctive forms in -se and -ra. Hispania, 8, 300–302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lledó, M.À. (2011). The independent standardization of Valencian: From official use to underground resistance. In J. Fishman, & O. García (Eds.), The handbook of language and ethnic identity: The success-failure continuum in language and ethnic identity efforts (Vol. 2, pp. 336–348). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lunn, P. V. (1995). The evaluative function of the Spanish subjunctive. In J. L. Bybee, & S. Fleischman (Eds.), Modality in grammar and discourse (pp. 429–449). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McDonough, K. (2006). Interaction and syntactic priming: English L2 speakers’ production of dative constructions. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 179–207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McKinnon, S. (2012). Intervocalic /s/ voicing in Catalonian Spanish. Unpublished honors thesis. The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2015). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. <[URL]>
Real Academia Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Planeta.Google Scholar
Rosemeyer, M., & Schwenter, S. (in press). Entrenchment and persistence in language change: the Spanish past subjunctive. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Advance online publication. DOI logo.
Schwenter, S. (2013). Strength of priming and the maintenance of variation in the Spanish past subjunctive. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 42, Pittsburgh, PA.
Shin, J. A., & Christianson, K. (2012). Structural priming and second language learning. Language Learning, 62, 931–964. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinner, C. (2004). El castellano de Cataluña. Estudio empírico de aspectos léxicos, morfosintácticos y metalingüísticos. Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Starreveld, P. A., de Groot, A. M. B., Rossmark, B. M. M., & van Hell, J. G. (2014). Parallel language activation during word processing in bilinguals: Evidence from word production in sentence context. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17, 258–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, B. (2005). Language users as creatures of habit: A corpus-based analysis of persistence in spoken English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 1, 113–149. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Travis, C. E. (2007). Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change, 19, 101–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vann, R. (1998). Aspects of Spanish deictic expressions in Barcelona: A quantitative examination. Language Variation and Change, 10, 263–288. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weiner, E. J., & Labov, W. (1983). Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics, 19, 29–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wright, Leavitt O. (1926). The subjunctive forms in -ra and -se in Spanish-American speech. Hispania, 9, 170–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

HOFF, MARK
2023. The Role of Frequency in Morphosyntactic Variation. In The Handbook of Usage‐Based Linguistics, ► pp. 197 ff. DOI logo
KANWIT, MATTHEW & JUAN BERRÍOS
2023. Corpora, Cognition, and Usage‐Based Approaches. In The Handbook of Usage‐Based Linguistics, ► pp. 269 ff. DOI logo
Feldhausen, Ingo & Christina Christ
2021. Die -ra/-se-Alternation beimsubjuntivo imperfectoim europäischen Spanisch: Eine soziolinguistische Korpusstudie. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 137:3 ► pp. 827 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.