VARIATION IN THE EXPRESSION OF FUTURE IN SPANISH: AN ANALYSIS OF ONLINE NEWS ON THE WORLD CUP 2014

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing the choices made by Hispanic-American newspapers when it comes to marking the future tense in Spanish. The future tense in Spanish, according to the Royal Spanish Academy (2009), can be expressed in at least three ways: the grammatical future (cantaré); the present tense with a future value (canto); and the periphrastic form consisting of the auxiliary “IR” (in the present) + the preposition “A” + the main verb in the infinitive form (voy a cantar). In order to do so, a corpus composed of 25 articles was selected from online websites about the FIFA World Cup held in Brazil in June 2014. A total of 156 instances were analyzed. The corpus was organized according to the five Spanish-speaking American geolectal areas (the Caribbean; Mexico and Central America; the Andes; the River Plate; and Chile). The theoretical framework is variationist sociolinguistics Labov (1978, 2008). The data were analyzed with GOLDVARB (2005), in order to observe the influence of factor groups such as agentivity, polarity, temporal modifiers, verb regularity, discourse types and location in the piece of news. Regarding the use of the grammatical future, it was observed that the following aspects are especially relevant: agentive and regular verbs and indirect speech. As for the use of the present with a future meaning, besides non-agentive and irregular verbs, there was a higher incidence in the headlines. Finally, concerning the use of the periphrastic form, the determining factors were found to be: irregular verbs and the absence of temporal modifiers.

Keywords

• Grammatical future
• Periphrastic future
• Present tense