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Selected Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics edited by Jonathan Holmquist, Augusto Lorenzino, and Lotfi Sayahi ISBN 978-1-57473-418-8 library binding viii+192 pages publication date: 2007 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract Rafael Orozco Social Constraints on the Expression of Futurity in Spanish-Speaking Urban Communities 103-112 (complete pdf) This study examines the linguistic variable used to express simple futurity in the indicative mood in Spanish which consists of three interchangeable forms: the morphological future, the simple present tense, and the periphrastic future. The corpus examined here was extracted from approximately 55 hours of tape recorded sociolinguistic interviews with two groups of twenty informants each: residents of the metropolitan area of Barranquilla, Colombia, and Colombian residents of the New York City metropolitan area. The results of this study revealed that the expression of futurity among New York Colombians is significantly constrained by four social factor groups. As in Barranquilla, age and sex have a significant impact in the New York Colombian community. However, the effect of sex is not the same in both populations. The fact that education and the combined effects of duration of stay and age of arrival in the United States also reached statistical significance suggests that bilingualism, direct contact with English, and dialect leveling may have an impact on the speech of New York Colombians. These results help increase our understanding of how the sociolinguistic forces constraining language variation in Colombian Spanish conform to established sociolinguistic theory. |