Subjunctive productivity and governor effects in US Spanish: Insights from productivity measures and mixed-effects modeling
Document Type
Paper Presentation
Presenter Language
English
Research Area
Sociolinguistics; Language variation and change; Spanish in the US
Location
MBSC Dodge Room 302A
Start Date
17-10-2024 2:00 PM
End Date
17-10-2024 2:30 PM
Abstract
Despite normative efforts for dictating when subjunctive should and should not be used, variationist research highlights the inherent variability of mood selection in both monolingual and bilingual contexts (LaCasse, 2018; Poplack et al., 2018; Schwenter & Hoff, 2020; Torres Cacoullos et al., 2017). This study analyzes mood variation using 48 sociolinguistic interviews from the Corpus del español en el sur de Arizona (Carvalho, 2012-). Following a bottom-up approach, all complement clauses in which subjunctive has been used at least once are included in the envelope of variation. Out of 2,010 tokens, the overall use of subjunctive mood is 18%, while indicative use reaches 82%. Despite these overall rates often being used to argue for mood simplification in US Spanish, this study, by combining different analytical methods, reveals the productivity of subjunctive use and its conditioners. First, a productivity measures analysis indicate that almost half of the governor pool consists of hapax legomena cases, which is evidence of a great dispersion of subjunctive across different contexts. The high number of hapax legomena represents a great number of instances of innovative extensions of the subjunctive form, indicative of a less grammaticalized and more productive use of subjunctive. Adding to this analysis of productivity, a mixed-effects logistic regression in R examines the effect of governor frequency, polarity, coreferentiality, and language use in the family as fixed effects, with speaker and governor as random effects. Results show that mood variation in Southern Arizona is significantly conditioned by all the factor groups in the model, which explains 69% of the variation in the dataset. However, an analysis of the variance explained reveals that 46% (two-thirds of the variance explained by the entire model) is accounted for by the lexical identity of the governor more specifically. This study provides strong evidence of the impact of governor effects as the primary determinant of mood variation in Spanish and contributes to the discussion of the systematicity of such variable in Spanish, regardless of contact with English.
References
Subjunctive productivity and governor effects in US Spanish: Insights from productivity measures and mixed-effects modeling
MBSC Dodge Room 302A
Despite normative efforts for dictating when subjunctive should and should not be used, variationist research highlights the inherent variability of mood selection in both monolingual and bilingual contexts (LaCasse, 2018; Poplack et al., 2018; Schwenter & Hoff, 2020; Torres Cacoullos et al., 2017). This study analyzes mood variation using 48 sociolinguistic interviews from the Corpus del español en el sur de Arizona (Carvalho, 2012-). Following a bottom-up approach, all complement clauses in which subjunctive has been used at least once are included in the envelope of variation. Out of 2,010 tokens, the overall use of subjunctive mood is 18%, while indicative use reaches 82%. Despite these overall rates often being used to argue for mood simplification in US Spanish, this study, by combining different analytical methods, reveals the productivity of subjunctive use and its conditioners. First, a productivity measures analysis indicate that almost half of the governor pool consists of hapax legomena cases, which is evidence of a great dispersion of subjunctive across different contexts. The high number of hapax legomena represents a great number of instances of innovative extensions of the subjunctive form, indicative of a less grammaticalized and more productive use of subjunctive. Adding to this analysis of productivity, a mixed-effects logistic regression in R examines the effect of governor frequency, polarity, coreferentiality, and language use in the family as fixed effects, with speaker and governor as random effects. Results show that mood variation in Southern Arizona is significantly conditioned by all the factor groups in the model, which explains 69% of the variation in the dataset. However, an analysis of the variance explained reveals that 46% (two-thirds of the variance explained by the entire model) is accounted for by the lexical identity of the governor more specifically. This study provides strong evidence of the impact of governor effects as the primary determinant of mood variation in Spanish and contributes to the discussion of the systematicity of such variable in Spanish, regardless of contact with English.