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Testing Twitter data on a morphosyntactic variable

The expression of the future in American and Peninsular Spanish
  • Andrés Enrique-Arias and Marina Gomila Albal
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Corpus Dialectology
This chapter is in the book Corpus Dialectology

Abstract

This research investigates the distribution of the morphological future cantaré (MF) and periphrastic future voy a cantar (PF) in Latin American Spanish compared to Peninsular Spanish through an analysis of Twitter data collected in six Spanish-speaking cities. Due to the written nature of the social network Twitter, rates of the MF in the data are much higher than those found in studies based on sociolinguistic interviews. While the Twitter results in our study do not confirm the alleged higher prevalence of the MF in Spain compared to Latin America, the data shows systematic variation patterns that reflect internal factor groups that have been explored in previous studies on the expression of futurity (temporal proximity to the speech act, and epistemic certainty) as well as register.

Abstract

This research investigates the distribution of the morphological future cantaré (MF) and periphrastic future voy a cantar (PF) in Latin American Spanish compared to Peninsular Spanish through an analysis of Twitter data collected in six Spanish-speaking cities. Due to the written nature of the social network Twitter, rates of the MF in the data are much higher than those found in studies based on sociolinguistic interviews. While the Twitter results in our study do not confirm the alleged higher prevalence of the MF in Spain compared to Latin America, the data shows systematic variation patterns that reflect internal factor groups that have been explored in previous studies on the expression of futurity (temporal proximity to the speech act, and epistemic certainty) as well as register.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction 1
  4. Part I. Data collection
  5. On the validity of crowdsourced data 10
  6. Variation in space and society 34
  7. Part II. Methodology
  8. The Phonologie du français contemporain project in Quebec 60
  9. “Going standard” on a blank page 84
  10. Sociogeographical differences in the pronunciation of Anglicisms in Spanish 106
  11. Part III. Case studies
  12. Historical corpora and linguistic geography of Spanish 134
  13. Dialectology as a matter of gradience 154
  14. Testing Twitter data on a morphosyntactic variable 176
  15. Part IV. Theory
  16. Sketching out a virtual framework for Romance geolinguistics 198
  17. Index 217
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.110.08enr

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction 1
  4. Part I. Data collection
  5. On the validity of crowdsourced data 10
  6. Variation in space and society 34
  7. Part II. Methodology
  8. The Phonologie du français contemporain project in Quebec 60
  9. “Going standard” on a blank page 84
  10. Sociogeographical differences in the pronunciation of Anglicisms in Spanish 106
  11. Part III. Case studies
  12. Historical corpora and linguistic geography of Spanish 134
  13. Dialectology as a matter of gradience 154
  14. Testing Twitter data on a morphosyntactic variable 176
  15. Part IV. Theory
  16. Sketching out a virtual framework for Romance geolinguistics 198
  17. Index 217
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