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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 24:1 (2019) ► pp.67–97

The indicative vs. subjunctive alternation with expressions of possibility in Spanish

A multifactorial analysis

| Michigan State University
| New Mexico State University

This study explores the indicative vs. subjunctive alternation in Spanish subordinate clauses following epistemic adverbials and expressions of possibility. Anchored in semantic-pragmatic and variationist theoretical frameworks, traditional research on mood alternation in Spanish remains largely experimental in nature. In contrast, we adopt a corpus-based multifactorial methodology to investigate 4,199 occurrences of fourteen expressions of possibility extracted from the Corpus del Español (e.g. caso de que, poder ser que, por si acaso, posiblemente, etc.) annotated contextually for structural, semantic and stylistic variables. Methodologically, we conduct an exploratory multiple correspondence analysis followed by a confirmatory binary logistic regression to examine whether/how the linguistic contexts affect mood variation. Overall, the results indicate that previously unexplored semantic factors (such as the inherent lexical aspect of verbs in subordinate clauses) significantly influence mood variation in Spanish. Ultimately, our results suggest that subjunctive uses are less uniform and more prone to internal variation than indicative uses.

Keywords: mood variation, possibility, logistic regression, correspondence analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Exploring mood variation: Theoretical and methodological insights from existing work
    • 2.1Theoretical approaches: Semantic perspectives
    • 2.2Theoretical approaches: Variationist perspectives
    • 2.3Extra linguistic considerations
    • 2.4Methodological insights: From experimental to corpus-based approaches
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus data, corpus extraction and semantic annotation
    • 3.2Statistical approach
      • 3.2.1Multiple correspondence analysis
      • 3.2.2Binary logistic regression
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Multiple correspondence analysis
    • 4.2Binary logistic regression
      • 4.2.1Main effects and interaction
      • 4.2.2A closer look at individual predicted uses of the subjunctive and the indicative
  • 5.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17038.des
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