Spanish shows variation between two future expressions. The synthetic future (SF) is marked morphologically while the periphrastic future (PF) is constructed with the verb
A língua espanhola mostra variação entre duas expressões futuras. O futuro sintético (FS) é marcado morfologicamente enquanto o futuro perifrástico (FP) é construído com o verbo
Spanish shows variation between two future expressions
(1) a.
eat-1sg.fut pizza tomorrow
b.
go to eat-inf pizza tomorrow
‘I will eat pizza tomorrow’
While several factors that seem to determine the use of these expressions have been proposed and thoroughly analyzed in the literature, the effects of priming
The structure of this work is as follows. In §1, we summarize the factors that have been recognized in the literature as the most important in the selection of the future expressions of interest. We also provide a brief account of priming and its role in the conservation of less frequent linguistic variants as well as the research questions. The methodology follows in
The forms of the Spanish futures can express a diversity of meanings other than futurity per se (AARON, 2014
(1) a.
difficult
‘He works in building a clinic and waits, I imagine it is quite difficult’
(MCNMA04)
b.
the Saturdays I.go to study.INF to Madrid
‘On Saturdays, I go to study to Madrid’ (MCN-MA05)
The present research, however, is concerned only with future expression forms conveying actual future-time reference. In this respect, a number of factors have been proposed in the literature as governing the use of future expression in Spanish. For instance, the
Additionally, governing factors of a more psychological nature have been proposed, as is the case of
While other potential linguistic factors that could affect the variation at hand have been proposed as well, such as style, temporal determinacy, and connection of the future event with the present of the speaker, they have found less support among scholars. For this reason, in this paper we focus on the two semantic factors that have been shown to be most relevant, namely
Importantly, despite the picture of complementary distribution in future expressions that the past characterizations may suggest, previous studies find that their distribution is by no means clear-cut. In fact, variation is found even in contexts that have been identified as highly preferring one form. Consequently, the selection of future expressions in Spanish has been described as lying between complementary distribution and “free variation”, suggesting that speakers have more choice in certain contexts than in others (AARON, 2014
Finally, in addition to these linguistic factors, the preference for one or the other future expression is also subject to dialect-specific tendencies. Sedano’s (2006
Source: Sedano (2006, p.284
A great wealth of evidence from psychology, psycholinguistics, and linguistics shows that speakers are more likely to use a syntactic construction that they have used or heard in the previous context - a phenomenon known
In turn, this finding has implications for language change. The authors find that
However, Rosemeyer and Schwenter (2019
In sum, the literature identifies several semantic factors that could affect the selection of future expressions in Spanish, such as temporal distance and certainty. However, it is also subject to extra-linguistic factors, especially dialect-specific preferences. While the SF is the least frequent future expression in all Spanish speaking countries, it is relatively more common in Spain. Other Spanish-speaking regions such as South America show lower rates of use of the SF. Finally, priming is another factor that can affect the use of linguistic variants. Previous studies show that its effects are stronger among less-frequent variants and that it can have a conserving effect in language change.
Informed by the studies described in the previous subsections, we propose the following research questions:
1. What effect does priming have on each Spanish future expression (PF and SF)?
2. What are the differences in priming effects on future expressions according to geographical region (South America vs Spain)?
These questions, in turn, have their corresponding hypotheses:
H1: a SF will be more likely after a previous SF in the discourse because it is the least frequent variant.
H2: there will be stronger priming effects of the SF in South American than in Peninsular Spanish because the SF is less frequent in South America.
As mentioned in the introduction, we looked for future expressions in two oral corpora of Spanish from Spain and South America. In total, we analyzed 82 interviews from tree cities in Spain - Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, and Seville - and three cities in South America - Buenos Aires (Agentina), La Paz (Bolivia) y Caracas (Venezuela). The key terms used for the searches in the corpora are shown in Table 1. We considered only future expression forms that had unambiguous future reference.
Priming was captured using the factor
(3)
then I.go to practice more and myself I.go to dedicate to all that
‘Then I will practice more and
In addition, each token was manually coded for the semantic factors
(4) a.
And afterwards, I.think that go-1PL.FUT to.the movies
‘And afterwards, I think that
b.
I believe that in Summer itself can… itself can-3SG.FUT more of hip
‘I believe that
The
(5) a.
(ALC-03)
b.
I myself do.not.know whether myself I.go to stay in the nine or ten books of
poetry
‘I myself don’t know whether
(MCN-SE07)
Finally, we coded for the
In this section we will provide the descriptive results of the variation between the PF and SF in Spain and South America. In
In total, we collected 679 tokens of future forms bearing future reference meanings. Overall, we find that the PF is the most frequent future expression - a finding that agrees with the previous literature on this alternation (e.g SEDANO, 2006
These percentages suggest that there is a change in the SF to the PF future form in the Spanish speaking world. We also ran a series of statistics analysis including data from both regions. These results were obtained through a mixed-effects logistic regression in R studio including
In this model, positive estimates mean that the factor favors the use of the SF while negative estimates mean that the factor disfavors the SF. Figure 3 shows that a recent PF significantly disfavors the occurrence of a SF (
We look now at the two different regions individually to understand what factors are con- tributing to the variation between the two future forms. In the South American Spanish varieties, as seen in figure 4, there is a lower rate of use of the SF in comparison to Spain. The logistic regression analyses for each region were done following the steps detailed in the previous section. Figure 5 contains the significant factors that rule the variation between the two future forms in South America.
As can be seen, the results of the best regression model for South America yielded very similar results to those in figure 3, showing again that the factor
Recall that, as seen in figure 4, Spain presented higher rates of the SF in comparison to South America. The results of the logistic regression for Spain can be seen in figure 6.
Here, we see again that the factor
Moreover, similarly to South America,
This study was set out to assess the importance of the priming effects in the occurrence of the Spanish future expressions. Our first hypothesis was the following:
H1: a synthetic future will be more likely after a previous synthetic future in the discourse because it is the least frequent variant.
This hypothesis was confirmed based on two main findings: first, we reported that the synthetic form is the least frequent variant in both dialects we studied (see figure 4). Second, we showed that a SF is more likely to surface after a recent SF in both regions. This was confirmed by the logistic regressions, which showed that the linguistic factor
Regarding the priming effect results, morphosyntactic priming has been shown to have an impact on language change in previous studies (ROSEMEYER, 2015
As previously explained, we captured this definition in the analysis by coding for the independent variable
The blue color in the graphs represents a recent SF. The priming effect can be observed in all three models. Rosemeyer and Schwenter (2019
As seen in the results from Spain and both regions combined, low frequency verbs disfavored the occurrence of a SF. In South America verb frequency was not significant because virtually there were no low frequency verbs with the SF as can be observed in figure 9.
Still concerning the effect of paradigmatic atrophy, even though
Now moving on to our second hypothesis that says:
H2: there will be stronger priming effects of the SF in South American than in Peninsular Spanish because the SF is less frequent in South America.
Our results showed priming effects in both regions, however, regarding the effect of paradigmatic atrophy we noticed that, in Spain, Spain, the SF is less contextually restricted in comparison to the data from South America. Figure 10 shows that a greater portion of the SF data appears with 1st person in comparison to the South American results.
Regarding the
Finally, commenting on the last factor that showed up as significant in our statistical analysis, we found that
The aim of our research was to examine the weight of the priming effects in the variation between the synthetic and periphrastic future forms in Spanish. To our knowledge, this was the first work to look at priming effects regarding the selection of future expression forms in Spanish. Our results showed that a combination of linguistic factors contribute to the occurrence of the SF:
We demonstrated that cognitive factors in combination with semantic ones should be taken into consideration when we talk about the variation between the SF and the PF in Spanish. Our study also provides evidence for the fact that the obsolescing construction - the synthetic form - will have a stronger priming effect in the larger process of language variation and change of future forms in Spanish. Our work offers an important addition to the literature about the effects of persistence and entrenchment in language. Our results also showed that speakers are sensitive to contextual activation and language-use factors. In conclusion, it is important that future studies about this and other related topics take into consideration semantic, frequency and cognitive factors.
Even though futurity in Spanish can be expressed through several forms, such as the Futurate Present or other modal constructions, this paper is only concerned with the variation between the Synthetic and Periphrastic futures, the so-called “morphosyntactic futures” (AARON, 2014
No original: “el diferente grado de certidumbre sobre el cumplimiento de la acción futura”.
S and P stand for singular and plural persons.