Spanish Present Subjunctive Usage by U.S. Spanish Heritage Speakers

e se-ra alternation in Spanish subjunctive

In this paper I take a look at a classic problem in Spanish morphosyntax, namely the alternation between the forms -se and -ra in the Imperfect Subjunctive (Imperfecto de Subjuntivo). Research on this topic hasmainly focused on sociolinguistic variation, and has been done almost exclusively with impressionistic data and speaker’s intuitions. I address the problem from a usage-based perspective,...

Heritage speakers of Spanish in the US Midwest: Reported interlocutors as a measure of family language relevance

This article presents the results of an analysis of reported interlocutors in Spanish in a group of heritage speakers (HS), in three communities of the US Midwest. Participants were college-aged bilinguals developing their own personal and professional networks outside the direct influence of their parents. Responses are compared with those from two control groups: college-aged native speakers ...

Case Studies in Eliciting the Spanish Subjunctive in

Previous research has shown that the Spanish subjunctive is a vulnerable mood in the process of acquisition for adult heritage speakers. Specifically, the subjunctive use in optional contexts tends to be more prone to simplification (i.e. in adjectival clauses). This subjunctive emerges in monolingual Spanish-speaking children as early as two years of age and reaches more adultlike development ...

The Spanish subjunctive: Procedural semantics and pragmatic inference

Heritage, Second-Language and Native Speakers’ Intuitions on Deictic Verbs in Spanish: Beyond the Linguist’s Intuitions

Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs venir ‘to come’, ir ‘to go’, traer ‘to bring’ and llevar ‘to take’ have drawn upon Fillmore’s (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs venir and traer to express movement towards the hearer. Under this egocentric view (Beinhauer, 1940; Ibañez, 1983), the Spanish verbs venir and traer can onl...