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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 26:2 (2021) ► pp.248–283

Two subjunctives or three?

A multimodel analysis of subjunctive tense variation in complement clauses in Spanish

ORCID logo | UiT The Arctic University of Norway
This paper examines the use of the three non-periphrastic subjunctives in Spanish in embedded clauses under obligatory subjunctive predicates in the past tense in three Spanish varieties: Argentinean, Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. By means of random forest and logistic regression analyses, I demonstrate that a grammar where the two “past” subjunctives make up one group, such that the variation can be modeled on a binary opposition between (morphologically) past vs. (morphologically) present, achieves better prediction accuracy and goodness-of-fit parameters than a grammar with a three-way split. The results suggest that, at least in complement clauses of obligatory subjunctive predicates, there appear to be no semantic differences between the two past subjunctives but there are still relatively large differences in how the three subjunctive forms are used across the three Spanish varieties studied.
Keywords: Spanish subjunctive, random forest, morphosyntactic variation, sequence of tense, multinomial logistic regression
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Spanish subjunctive
    • 2.1Concordantia temporum or sequence of tense in the subjunctive
    • 2.2The evolution of the two past subjunctives
    • 2.3Previous accounts of the distinction between -se and -ra
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1The data
    • 3.2Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Descriptive statistics
    • 4.2Random forest models
      • 4.2.1The multiclass model
      • 4.2.2The binary model
    • 4.3Regression analyses
      • 4.3.1The multiclass logistic regression
      • 4.3.2The binary logistic regression
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1The main findings
    • 5.2The present subjunctive in Argentinean Spanish
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.19130.gua
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