Chapter 15
An initial examination of imperfect subjunctive variation in Catalonian Spanish
A contact linguistics and usage-based approach
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.
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
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