Chapter 1
Cross-dialectal productivity of the Spanish subjunctive in
nominal clause complements
We performed a large-scale corpus study of the
subjunctive across Argentine, Mexican, and Peninsular Spanish, in
order to determine possible differences in productivity across
dialects. Our data (N = 6,822) from the
web/dialects section of Davies’
(2016–)
Corpus del Español were
collected through random sampling of 22 matrix verb governors. All
three dialects were significantly different from one another in
type:token ratio, whereas only Spain differed from the others in
terms of hapax legomena:type ratio. Furthermore,
only eight verbs showed the same behavior across all dialects.
Subjunctive productivity thus varies by both dialect and governor,
thereby revealing the critical importance of both inter- and
intra-dialectal variation for the correct analysis of
morphosyntactic phenomena. The conditioning of the variation across
dialects, nevertheless, was similar: mixed-effects logistic
regression in R revealed that negated governors and cases of
non-coreferentiality between main and subordinate clause subjects
select significantly more subjunctive.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Previous literature
- 2.1The Spanish subjunctive
- 2.2Morphological productivity
- 3.Research questions and hypotheses
- 4.Methods
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion and conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
-
Appendix
References
Baayen, R. H.
(
2009)
Corpus
linguistics in morphology: Morphological
productivity. In
A. Lüdeling &
M. Kyto (Eds.),
Corpus
linguistics: An international
handbook (pp. 900–919). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Blake, R.
(
1981)
Some
empirically based observations on adult usage of the
subjunctive mood in Mexico
City. In
J. Lantolf &
G. Stone (Eds.),
Current
research in Romance
languages (pp. 13–22). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Bosque, I.
(
2012)
Mood:
Indicative vs.
subjunctive. In
J. I. Hualde,
A. Olarrea &
E. O’Rourke (Eds.),
The
handbook of hispanic
linguistics (pp. 373–394). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Busch, H-J.
(
2017)
A
complete guide to the Spanish subjunctive: A reference for
teachers. London: Routledge.
Bybee, J.
(
2010)
Language,
usage and
cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bybee, J., & Torres Cacoullos, R.
Davies, M.
(
2016–)
Corpus
del español: Two billion words, 21
countries. Retrieved
from
[URL]> (
16 March 2020).
DeMello, G.
(
1995)
Alternancia
modal indicativo/subjuntivo con expresiones de posibilidad y
probabilidad.
Verba, 22, 339–361.
Gallego, M., & Alonso-Marks, E.
(
2014)
Degrees
of subjunctive vitality among monolingual speakers of
Peninsular and Argentinian
Spanish.
Borealis: An
international journal of Hispanic
linguistics, 2(2), 95–105.
González-Salinas, A.
(
2003)
The
use of present subjunctive and modal alternation in three
socio-educational groups from Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico:
A descriptive and comparative linguistic
analysis (Unpublished
doctoral
dissertation). State University of New York.
Hoff, M.
(
2019)
Settledness
and mood alternation: A semantic-pragmatic analysis of
Spanish future-framed
adverbials (Unpublished
doctoral dissertation). The Ohio State University.
Kempchinsky, P.
(
2009)
What
can the subjunctive disjoint reference effect tell us about
the
subjunctive? Lingua, 119, 1788–1810.
Kempchinsky, P.
(
2016)
Subjuntivo. In
J. Gutiérrez-Rexach (Ed.),
Enciclopedia
de lingüística
hispánica, vol. 2 (pp. 65–74). New York, NY: Routledge.
Labov, W
(
1972)
Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press.
LaCasse, D.
(
2018)
Structural
and semantic conditioning of the New Mexican Spanish
subjunctive: Maintenance in a contact
variety. Presented
at
NWAV 47,
NYU, 18–21 October,
2018.
Martín Butragueño, P., & Lastra, Y.
(
2011–2015)
Corpus
sociolingüístico de la ciudad de
México. México: El Colegio de México. Retrieved
from
[URL]
Pierrehumbert, J., & Granell, R.
(
2018)
On
hapax legomena and morphological
productivity. In
S. Kübler &
G. Nicolai (Eds.),
Proceedings
of the 15th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in
Phonetics, Phonology, and
Morphology (pp. 125–130). Brussels: The Special Interest Group on Computational Morphology and Phonology.
Poplack, S., Torres Cacoullos, R., Dion, N., Berlinck, R. de A., Digesto, S., Lacasse, D., & Steuck, J.
(
2018)
Variation
and grammaticalization in Romance: A cross-linguistic study
of the
subjunctive. In
W. Ayres-Bennett &
J. Carruthers (Eds.),
Manuals
in linguistics: Romance
sociolinguistics (pp. 217–52). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Quer, J.
(
2001)
Interpreting
mood.
Probus, 13(1), 81–111.
Rosemeyer, M., & Schwenter, S.
(
2019)
Entrenchment
and persistence in language change: The Spanish past
subjunctive.
Corpus
Linguistics and Linguistic
Theory, 15(1), 167–204.
Silva-Corvalán, C.
(
1994)
The
gradual loss of mood distinctions in Los Angeles
Spanish.
Language Variation
and
Change, 6(3), 255–272.
Tagliamonte, S.
(
2006)
Historical change in synchronic perspective: The legacy of British dialects. In
Ans van Kemenade and
Bettelou Los (eds.),
The handbook of the history of English, 477–506. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Torres Cacoullos, R., LaCasse, D., Johns, M., & De la Rosa Yacomelo, J.
(
2017)
El
subjuntivo: Hacia la
rutinización.
Moenia: Revista
Lucense de Lingüística y
Literatura, 23, 73–94.
Torres Cacoullos, R., & Travis, C.
(
2018)
Bilingualism
in the community: Code-switching and grammars in
contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Villalta, E.
(
2008)
Mood
and gradability: An investigation of the subjunctive mood in
Spanish.
Linguistics and
Philosophy, 31, 467–522.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Giancaspro, David, Silvia Perez‐Cortes & Josh Higdon
2022.
(Ir)regular Mood Swings: Lexical Variability in Heritage Speakers’ Oral Production of Subjunctive Mood.
Language Learning 72:2
► pp. 456 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 june 2023. 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.