An initial examination of imperfect subjunctive variation in Catalonian Spanish

Abstract While most Romance languages have only one morphological form for the imperfect subjunctive, Spanish exhibits variation between two morphological paradigms: -ra and -se. The present study investigated the distribution of these forms according to linguistic factors in Catalonian Spanish, a variety in close contact with Catalan. A corpus of 1,075 imperfect subjunctive tokens was compiled from the letters to the editor section of the regional newspaper La Vanguardia. Results show that the overall distribution of -se is slightly higher than what has been reported for European Spanish. Furthermore, a multivariate analysis revealed that structural priming, the existence of a cognate verb in Catalan and the combination of local frequency and morphological irregularity in the imperfect subjective significantly favor the use of -se.