Frequency of Subjunctive Use in Oral Production in Two Varieties of Spanish

Abstract

This research establishes an analysis of mood use in semi-spontaneous oral production in two varieties of Spanish. A total of 104 adult monolingual native speakers of Spanish participated in the study (N=56 from Rosario, Argentina and N=48 from Toledo, Spain). Data were collected by means of a guided oral elicitation task. Results indicated vitality of subjunctive use among older speakers (51-73 years old) in both regions. However, non-subjunctive forms were more frequent among younger speakers (18-30 years old) in Rosario, while speakers in Toledo still favored the use of present subjunctive. This tendency was also evident in middle-aged speakers. Overall, reduction of present subjunctive use among younger generations is more notorious in Rosario while subjunctive use appears more robust in Toledo.

L2 Spanish morphosyntactic development through collaborative writing: An analysis of mood production, text length and syntactic complexity

“…Some of those factors might impact subjunctive acquisition and determine that subjunctive forms go unnoticed or are not accurately processed. First, its low frequency (Biber et al, 2006;Collentine, 2010) Marks, 2014aMarks, , 2014bMarks, , 2015Lastra & Butragueño, 2012;Silva-Corvalán, 1994.…”