Testing Twitter data on a morphosyntactic variable
The expression of the future in American and Peninsular Spanish
This research investigates the distribution of
the morphological future cantaré (MF) and
periphrastic future voy a cantar (PF) in Latin
American Spanish compared to Peninsular Spanish through an analysis
of Twitter data collected in six Spanish-speaking cities. Due to the
written nature of the social network Twitter, rates of the MF in the
data are much higher than those found in studies based on
sociolinguistic interviews. While the Twitter results in our study
do not confirm the alleged higher prevalence of the MF in Spain
compared to Latin America, the data shows systematic variation
patterns that reflect internal factor groups that have been explored
in previous studies on the expression of futurity (temporal
proximity to the speech act, and epistemic certainty) as well as
register.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Future expression in the Spanish dialects
- 3.Twitter as a corpus
- 4.Results
- 4.1Register
- 4.2Verb frequency and lexical type
- 4.3Temporal distance
- 4.4Assertiveness
- 5.Conclusions
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Notes
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References