Principales rasgos gramaticales del español de Costa Rica

Abstract

This work offers an in-depth description of the main morphosyntactic (and lexical) features found in present Costa Rican Spanish, a lesser-known Central American variety. Text corpora and sociolinguistic surveys help us to provide an updated grammatical overview, which takes into account most categories: nouns and adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and idioms, and is illustrated by examples taken both from formal and informal settings. By comparing these features with previous grammatical descriptions, this study helps in identifying some common American features – such as the use of hasta and una mi amiga – as well as some specific patterns – such as the prominence of several suffixes and parasynthetic verbs, as well as some adverbs – in present-day Costa Rican Spanish, some of which remain to be incorporated in the Academy grammar.