The Use of the Future Subjunctive in Colonial Spanish Texts: Evidence of Vitality or Demise?

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clauses. However, the corpora examined provide no evidence that the paradigm survived longer in Latin American Spanish than in Peninsular Spanish, as has been argued. Rather, this study suggests that by the eighteenth century, the future subjunctive was a highly stylized marker of formality or politeness in written Spanish.

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La variation dans les Constructions Verbales Figées de l’espagnol d’Amérique

Lingvisticae Investigationes ◽

10.1075/li.38.2.05mog ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 38 (2) ◽

pp. 276-300 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Pedro Mogorrón Huerta

Keyword(s):

Latin American ◽

Complete Data ◽

Research Papers ◽

Data Bases ◽

Syntactic Structures ◽

Fixed Expressions ◽

Latin American Spanish ◽

American Spanish ◽

Peninsular Spanish ◽

Near Future

Traditionally, research papers on fixed expressions emphasize the fact that those sequences are fixed compared to constructions with free components. After one study which was carried out in 2010 through which we were able to prove that a considerable number of verbal fixed expressions in common Peninsular Spanish allow changes in some of their components without causing a change in the meaning and maintaining their fixed state, in this paper we analyze verbal fixed expressions in the Latin American Spanish variety. This analysis allows us to observe the modes of variation in the Latin American Spanish verbal fixed expressions (paradigm, lexic, morphology, grammar) by following the same patterns and syntactic structures as in common Penninsular Spanish which we find in the case of diatopic expressions formed in the verbal fixed expressions of common Penninsular Spanish as well as in new diatopic verbal fixed expressions. The fact that there are so many verbal fixed expressions in the Latin American Spanish variety and also that this number will only increase in the near future reinforces the idea that we should create very complete data bases.

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A cognitive sociolinguistic approach to metaphor and denominative variation

Review of Cognitive Linguistics ◽

10.1075/rcl.12.1.07ure ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 193-222 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

José Manuel Ureña Gómez-Moreno ◽

Pamela Faber

Keyword(s):

Latin American ◽

Marine Biology ◽

Scientific Language ◽

Qualitative And Quantitative ◽

Domain Specific ◽

Automatic Retrieval ◽

Latin American Spanish ◽

American Spanish ◽

Peninsular Spanish ◽

Quantitative Account

This research applied corpus analysis techniques to a corpus of marine biology texts in Peninsular Spanish (PS) and Latin American Spanish (LAS). The results explain why these varieties of Spanish have different designations for the same sea organism. The focus of our research was thus on types of formal onomasiological variation (Geeraerts, Grondelaers, & Bakema, 1994) and its pervasiveness in Spanish scientific discourse. Also addressed was the incidence of metaphor in specialized concept formation and designation. Domain-specific and standard strategies were used for the semi-automatic retrieval of metaphorical terms. The resulting qualitative and quantitative account of terminological diversity reflected the pervasiveness of intralingual denominative variation in scientific language and also identified its causes.

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An Authentic Pan-Hispanic Language Policy? Spain as the Point of Reference in the Spanish Royal Academy’s Diccionario de la lengua espaÑola

International Journal of Lexicography ◽

10.1093/ijl/ecz012 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 32 (4) ◽

pp. 498-527

Author(s):

Susana Rodríguez Barcia ◽

Andre Moskowitz

Keyword(s):

Language Policy ◽

Latin American ◽

Careful Analysis ◽

Electronic Version ◽

Economic Interests ◽

International Standing ◽

Latin American Spanish ◽

American Spanish ◽

Peninsular Spanish ◽

Real Academia

Abstract Despite the Spanish Royal Academy’s claim that it has broken away from its Eurocentric perspective and embraced a pan-Hispanic approach, a careful analysis of its dictionary, the Diccionario de la lengua española (DLE), reveals a clear bias in favor of Peninsular Spanish usage and a systematic relegation of Latin American Spanish to an inferior, subsidiary status. This paper arises out of that specific concern and is focused on a close reading of the Spanish Royal Academy’s DLE in its most recent electronic version 23.1 (2017). In this paper we will show that the Real Academia Española’s claim of a pan-Hispanic approach is in fact a disingenuous smokescreen and that, in reality, the DLE places Latin American Spanish usage in an inferior and subsidiary status via-a-vis Peninsular Spanish usage. To demonstrate this, we have classified selected dictionary entries into two categories: 1) Latin American Spanish usages that are defined by cross-references to the term used in Peninsular Spanish; and 2) usages that occur frequently in Spain and rarely in Spanish-speaking Latin America (Peninsular Spanish usages or españolismos) but are defined in the Dictionary with no geographic marker whatsoever. The results of our analysis reveal that the DLE repeatedly presents Peninsular Spanish usage as if it were General Spanish or ‘neutral Spanish’ and portrays Latin American Spanish as the ‘other.’ This study reveals the fallacy of the RAE’s pan-Hispanic language policy, an institutional device that attempts to force linguistic unity centered around Peninsular Spanish usage where no such unity in fact exists. We will also show that the motivation for this policy stems from a combination of a neocolonial bias and economic interests that seek to promote Spain’s international standing and branding as a country.

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Phases, labeling, antilocality and intonational phrases: recomplementation in Spanish

Probus ◽

10.1515/probus-2019-0002 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 31 (1) ◽

pp. 187-231 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Gabriel Martínez Vera

Keyword(s):

Latin American ◽

Syntactic Analysis ◽

The Novel ◽

Verb Movement ◽

Syntactic Structures ◽

Latin American Spanish ◽

American Spanish ◽

Intonational Phrases ◽

Reconstruction Effects

Abstract This paper addresses recomplementation (i.e. double-complementizer constructions) in Spanish, comparing Latin American Spanish (LAS) and European Spanish (ES). I make the novel observation that in spite of a superficial difference whereby a lower que after a left dislocate (LD) surfaces in ES but not in LAS, LAS does have recomplementation. In fact, LAS patterns with ES in that there are two constructions in each variety, i.e. a construction in which an intonational break following the LD is present and a construction in which the break is absent. I argue that the constructions with the break differ from the constructions without it with regard to reconstruction effects, no insertion and the position of high adverbs, which arise due to a locality violation in the former but not in the latter. I propose a syntactic analysis in terms of phases and argue that the locality violation is circumvented in the constructions with no break via verb movement, which is not possible in the constructions with the break. I further propose a mapping from the syntactic structures of recomplementation into prosody that correlates with the presence/absence of the intonational break in these constructions, hence providing prosodic evidence for phasal structure more generally.

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Phraseological features in conversational routines

Lingvisticae Investigationes ◽

10.1075/li.38.2.07alv ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 38 (2) ◽

pp. 313-330

Author(s):

M. Belén Alvarado-Ortega

Keyword(s):

Latin American ◽

Pragmatic Approach ◽

Latin American Spanish ◽

American Spanish ◽

Peninsular Spanish

This paper deals with the analysis of routine formulas according to their degree of independence in discourse, with the aim of establishing a gradual line which restructures Sphere III (Corpas 1996, Alvarado 2015) — where phraseological utterances belong. The system developed by Briz and the Val.Es.Co. Group (2003, 2014) will help us segment conversation and check that phraseological utterances show various degrees of independence, both in Peninsular Spanish and in Latin American Spanish, which will make it possible to restructure Sphere III. The methodology utilized corresponds to the phraseological and pragmatic approach, and the examples were extracted from the Corpus de Conversaciones Coloquiales of Briz and the Val.Es.Co. Group (2002), and from the Corpus Preseea (2014).

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