Evidentiality and bilingualism: conjectural future in Catalan/Spanish bilingual speakers
Authors
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Aoife Ahern
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4065-3909
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José Amenós-Pons
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2980-7003
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Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes
Universitat de les Illes Balears
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4598-7414
Abstract
This article explores variation in strategies for expressing evidentiality in two Romance languages, Catalan and Spanish, analysing differences in the knowledge and use of the strategies shown by bilingual speakers of these two languages in contact. In our study, 96 bilingual speakers from the Balearic Islands, with different degrees of Catalan/ Spanish language dominance, performed two tasks: (a) choosing between future and two other ways of expressing conjecture in a set of utterances; and (b) judging the acceptability of a set of utterances that involve using the future tense for expressing conjecture (with different aspectual configurations that impact on grammaticality). The bilingual participants’ responses were compared with those of a group of 32 monolingual Spanish speakers. We examine the correlations between the participants’ linguistic profile (including factors like the frequency of use of each language and their language attitudes) and their acceptability judgements in each language. Group and individual analyses inform on possible effects of the bilingual speakers’ language experiences and the types of linguistic competence that they develop, as well as on their preferences and choices when using the two languages and when interpreting utterances. Finally, our results are related to the possible convergence of the structures in the two languages. We conclude that the semantics of the future tense, for our bilingual speakers, is the same in Catalan as in Spanish. Regarding the use of the future to express conjecture, Majorcan Spanish is similar to Catalan and diverges from the tendencies observed in most varieties of SpanishKeywords:
Evidentiality, Conjectural future, Catalan, Spanish, Bilingual speakersReferences
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