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In:Variation and Evolution: Aspects of language contact and contrast across the Spanish-speaking world
Edited by Sandro Sessarego, Juan J. Colomina-Almiñana and Adrián Rodríguez-Riccelli
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 29] 2020
► pp. 11–32

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Chapter 1
Cross-dialectal productivity of the Spanish subjunctive in nominal clause complements

 | The Ohio State University
 | Universiteit Gent
Published online: 11 August 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.29.01sch
Abstract
We performed a large-scale corpus study of the subjunctive across Argentine, Mexican, and Peninsular Spanish, in order to determine possible differences in productivity across dialects. Our data (N = 6,822) from the web/dialects section of Davies’ (2016–) Corpus del Español were collected through random sampling of 22 matrix verb governors. All three dialects were significantly different from one another in type:token ratio, whereas only Spain differed from the others in terms of hapax legomena:type ratio. Furthermore, only eight verbs showed the same behavior across all dialects. Subjunctive productivity thus varies by both dialect and governor, thereby revealing the critical importance of both inter- and intra-dialectal variation for the correct analysis of morphosyntactic phenomena. The conditioning of the variation across dialects, nevertheless, was similar: mixed-effects logistic regression in R revealed that negated governors and cases of non-coreferentiality between main and subordinate clause subjects select significantly more subjunctive.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous literature
    • 2.1The Spanish subjunctive
    • 2.2Morphological productivity
  • 3.Research questions and hypotheses
  • 4.Methods
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (26)
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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