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Article published In:
Comparing Crosslinguistic Complexity
Edited by Jenny Ström Herold and Magnus Levin
[Languages in Contrast 24:1] 2024
► pp. 33–56

The Spanish subjunctive mood and its English correspondences

A case for complexity across languages

| University of León , Spain
| University of León , Spain

Corpus-based contrastive studies have successfully addressed the empirical study of crosslinguistic similarities and differences and may also contribute to understanding complexity across languages. This paper aims at (dis)proving whether the Spanish subjunctive mood shows greater complexity than its English correspondences as translations or sources of the Spanish subjunctive forms. It also explores a trade-off between language levels, i.e., whether higher morphological complexity is linked to syntactic and lexical complexity. The data come from a bidirectional English-Spanish corpus, and the word-alignment-based metric system has been used to quantify morphological complexity. Syntactic and lexical complexity were also investigated and computed using tests of statistical significance. Results corroborate that Spanish presents higher complexity in this verbal area in all three levels, morphological, syntactic, and lexical: the hypothesized trade-off between higher morphological complexity on the one hand, and lower syntactic and lexical complexity on the other is not validated by our data.

Keywords: subjunctive mood, parallel corpus, complexity measures, word-alignment metric, English/Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Complexity
    • 2.1Language complexity
    • 2.2Measuring complexity
  • 3.The subjunctive in English and Spanish
  • 4.Data and method
    • 4.1The bidirectional corpus
    • 4.2Method
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1English morphological correspondences of Spanish subjunctives
    • 5.2Clause types including subjunctives in English and Spanish
    • 5.3Lexical licensers in subjunctive environments in English and Spanish
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 16 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00034.ram
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