Variación modal entre los bilingües de español-inglés en el sur de Arizona: continuidades dialectales y consideraciones metodológicas

Abstract

The understanding, study and teaching of mood selection in Spanish has been traditionally shaped by prescriptivist accounts. This paper explores mood selection in Spanish spoken in Southern Arizona from a different perspective, one that considers obligatory contexts as variable. Results point to an intergenerational transmission of a variable grammar in which indicative enters U.S. Spanish mainly through the repertoire of third-generation bilinguals and linguistic contexts such as temporal clauses. Cross-dialectal comparisons indicate a similar variable behavior in both varieties of Spanish spoken in Southern Arizona and Los Angeles, pointing to a continuity across U.S. Southwest Spanish. The current study also identifies methodological gaps in the study of mood selection and discusses considerations that are crucial for a research agenda on this variable, especially in what concerns U.S. Spanish.