19. Está muy diferente a como era antes

Abstract

The presence in Spanish and other Romance languages of two copular verbs, both able to form constructions with the same adjectives and participles, has been the cause of competition for semantic space since the 12th century (Vaño-Cerdá 1982). Recent studies (Cortés-Torres 2004; De Jonge 1993; Gutiérrez 1994; and Silva-Corvalán 1986) have shown the struggle continues in bilingual varieties of Spanish as well as in monolingual varieties. The innovative use ofestarin contexts that were prescriptively reserved forserwas examined in New Mexico Spanish using data from the New Mexico Colorado Spanish Survey (Bills & Vigil 1999). Employing a variationist approach, the influence of several sociolinguistic factors on the variable use of the two copulas was evaluated quantitatively using GoldVarb (Rand & Sankoff 1999), a variable rule application program. Results for linguistic factors show the greatest magnitude of effect for type of adjective, followed by grammatical person, the presence of a time adverbial, codeswitching, the presence of an intensifier, and verb tense (which was not selected as significant). Of the three social variables evaluated, level of education was significant while gender was not, and the factor of age of speaker was eliminated due to incoherent results. These results concur with those of the other researchers and show that the same factors effecting the slow, gradual change in the usage ofestarin both educated and uneducated dialects in Mexico City, Caracas, Morelia, Cuernavaca, and Los Angeles are also at work in the archaic and stigmatized northern New Mexico/southern Colorado variety of Spanish.