La ductilidad de las formas: Estrategias mediativas en el español americano

Articulo

Summary

In this work we analyse some alternating uses of the subjunctive forms in Spanish in utterances by speakers who are in contact with Quechua and Guaraní languages. Our starting point is the realisation of a gradual tendency in nowadays Spanish to expand the use of Present over Imperfect (Spanish tenses), as well as the form –ra over –se in the same tense (Speranza 2020, 2021a, 2021b). We believe that the analysed variation is linked to both the notion of evidentiality, generally, and mediativity (Guentchèva 1996) specifically, to designate the semantic substance underlying the choice of the speaker. We attempt to establish the link between the observed uses and the conceptualizations which characterise languages in contact. We are interested in studying the way the features of adstrate languages operate in the selection process of the speakers –with diverse degrees of bilingualism– regarding those Spanish forms, and how those uses consolidate in the making of varieties with features of their own.

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http://hdl.handle.net/11336/236256