Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to BilingualismVol. 10:5 (2020) ► pp.728–744
Squib
Comment Clauses and mood choice in New York City Spanish
Generational constraints and innovations
This paper focuses on Spanish grammatical mood variation in Comment Clauses (e.g., es mejor que no
vayas (subjunctive) / vas (indicative) ‘it’s better you not go’) in the speech of two generations in
New York City. The data come from 36 participants, 18 from each of two generational cohorts. Carried out within the
variationist-sociolinguistic research paradigm, we test grammatical mood against eight variables, four external (generation,
region, speaker sex, language skill) and four internal (grammatical tense, clause type, lexical identity, negation). Statistical
findings reveal that generation significantly conditions subjunctive use (the first generation has a significantly higher rate of
use of subjunctive forms than does the second generation); English skill conditions first-generation subjunctive use (those with
‘good or excellent’ English skills have a higher subjunctive rate than those with ‘fair or poor’ English skills); clause type
conditions both generations’ subjunctive use (impersonal constructions yield a higher subjunctive rate than personal
constructions); lexical identity and negation in the matrix clause both condition first-generation use of mood
(gustar ‘to like’ favors the indicative; importar ‘to be important’ and ser
+ impersonal expression ‘to be’ both favor the subjunctive). Generational differences are thus observed with respect to both
social and linguistic conditioning factors.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1The data
- 2.Methodology
- 3.Findings and discussion
- 4.Concluding remarks
- Notes
-
References
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Viner, Kevin Martillo
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