Dialectal variation in mood choice in Spanish journalistic prose

Abstract

This article examines dialectal variation in mood choice in journalistic prose after the adverbials después de que ‘after’ and luego de que ‘after’ in subordinate clauses of past temporal complex sentences in Spanish. Because the matrix clause of sentences of this type contains a verb in a past tense, indicating that an action has certainly taken place, the event of the verb in the subordinate clause headed by después de que or luego de que is anterior to this completed event and is also a necessarily completed event that therefore is in a prescriptively indicative context. However, data collected from an on-line corpus of Spanish texts from Spanish-speaking countries and from on-line periodicals show that journalistic prose from Spain universally opts for the subjunctive mood in these contexts, whereas Mexico tends to use the indicative. Other Spanish-speaking countries show varying degrees of frequency of choice for these moods. Previous approaches to explaining mood choice have maintained that variation in mood choice in the complement clause is determined by the intentions of the speaker. The data in this study refute these claims by demonstrating that the use of the indicative or the subjunctive mood is well established in Mexico and Spain, respectively, and variable in the other Spanish-speaking countries.The author wishes to thank the College of Arts and Letters at Old Dominion University for a summer research grant to carry out this study. Special thanks go to Janet Bing, Charles Ruhl, and Alfredo Urzúa of Old Dominion University for their endless patience and attention to detail in reviewing this work. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Keith Walters of the University of Texas at Austin for recommending this journal for the placement of this article.