Periphrastic and morphological future forms in Bogotá Spanish: A preliminary sociolinguistic study of upper class speakers

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Published: Oct 25, 2018

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Dunia Catalina Méndez Vallejo

Abstract

The use of periphrastic (voy a estudiar Im going to study) and morphological (estudiaré I will study) future forms has been widely studied in Spanish (Sedano, 1994; Almeida & Díaz, 1998; Aaron, 2006). In Colombian Spanish, however, only a few investigations have been conducted (Montes, 1962; Berschin, 1987; Orozco, 2005). Motivated by previous research, the present study describes the use of periphrastic and morphological future forms in a specific Colombian dialect (Bogotá Spanish), in two different types of corpora: an oral corpus from the 1990s (Samper-Padilla et al., 1998), and a written corpus of readers opinions sections from five online Colombian newspapers. Given the limitations of the corpora, this investigation restricts its analysis to the production of future forms by upper-class speakers from Bogotá in order to examine the distribution of these forms in both oral and written data, and in relation to social and linguistic variables. A total of 352 cases were analyzed by the statistical program Goldvarb 2.0 (Rand & Sankoff, 1990), and both social and linguistic variables were included in the analysis. The results show that the periphrastic form is most frequently used in the oral data (79.2%), whereas the morphological form is substantially preferred in the written data (82.2%). Contrary to what has been found in previous investigations (Sedano, 1994; Orozco, 2005; Almeida & Díaz, 1998; Díaz & Almeida, 2000), the analysis suggests that both proximal and non-proximal future situations favor the use of the morphological form in oral data (.765 and .934, respectively), and disfavor it in written data (.140 and .474, respectively). A closer look at the distribution of the remaining cases of the periphrastic future in temporally unspecified situations in the oral corpus (95/114), indicates that 38 cases (40%) clearly show futurity, whereas the other 57 cases (60%) are used with some type of modality (speakers predictions, speakers actions in a hypothetical situation, or other hypothetical uses). Although the number of cases analyzed here is limited and further research is needed, the data suggest that the periphrastic future may be acquiring modal uses that have been exclusively associated with the morphological future (predictions, hypotheses, etc.).

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Issue
Vol. 8 No. 1 (2008)
Section
Articles

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