Chapter 2
The expression of futurity
This chapter explores the expression of futurity in terms of the distribution of its variants (morphological future, periphrastic future, and simple present) and the linguistic predictors that condition them. The more frequent occurrence of the periphrastic form and the reduction in the morphological future usage are congruent with findings throughout the Hispanic World. The similarity of predictor effects found to exist between Barranquilla and New York City suggests that, despite the influence of language contact, the two speaker cohorts are still members of the same speech community. Moreover, the results indicate that the change in progress from the preferential use of the morphological future to that of the periphrastic future seems to have accelerated in the diasporic setting. The findings help explain other instances of morphosyntactic variation, especially those involving analytic and synthetic variants, thus augmenting our knowledge of language variation and change.
Article outline
- 2.1The expression of futurity in Spanish
- 2.1.1The morphological future (MF)
- 2.1.2The simple present (SP) or futurate present
- 2.1.3The periphrastic future (PF)
- 2.1.4
The future around the world
- 2.2Methodology
- 2.2.1Research questions and hypotheses
- 2.2.2Predictors examined
- 2.2.3The envelope of variation and the analysis
- 2.3Distribution of variants
- 2.4Internal conditioning effects
- 2.4.1Clause-level predictors
- Clause length
- Clause type
- Temporal distance
- 2.4.2Subject-level predictors
- Grammatical number of the subject
- 2.4.3Predicate-level predictors
- Verb transitivity
-
Adverbial specification
- Length of MF inflection
- 2.5Discussion
- 2.6
Conclusion
-
Notes