Abstract
This paper explores five grammatical features in Argentinian and Uruguayan Spanish using the Corpus del español. The goal is to find features that distinguish the speech of the two countries. The features studied are: (1) stress variation in 2nd person singular present subjunctive forms (e.g. téngas ~ tengás), (2) number agreement with había (e.g. habían ~ había muchos casos), (3) use of vos following prepositions (e.g. con vos ~ contigo), (4) use of present perfect versus preterite (e.g. recién he comido ~ comí), (5) use of the present or past subjunctive in embedded clauses preceded by a matrix clause containing a subjunctive trigger in the past tense (e.g. Nos mandaron que rellenáramos ~ rellenemos los papeles anoche). Statistical analyses were carried out on the proportion of each variant across the two countries, and significant differences were observed.
Highlights
This paper explores five grammatical features in Argentinian and Uruguayan Spanish using the Corpus del español (Davies 2017)
The purpose of this study has been to use corpus data to explore five grammatical features that may serve to distinguish the linguistic variety of Uruguay and that of Argentina
One finding is that the use of existential haber in the imperfect tense more often agrees with the following plural predicate in Uruguay than it does in Argentina (e.g. Había varias maneras)
Summary
All data were gleaned from the Corpus del español / Web dialects (Davies 2016), except when noted otherwise. This corpus was compiled recently and 60% of it derives from blogs, meaning it covers more informal registers quite well. This is important because highly edited materials from printed sources are less likely to demonstrate the regional differences explored in the present paper. The Corpus del español / Web dialects includes 38.7 million words from Uruguay and 169.4 million from Argentina. When divided by their respective corpus size in millions of words tomar mate (or its inflectional variants) occurs 3.25 times per million in Argentina and 6.74 times per million in Uruguay, suggesting that Uruguayans talk about mate, and probably drink it, more than their neighbors to the west
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