David Landfair

Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 6, Issue 5 - January 2005

The Expression of Futurity in the Urban Speech of Seville

The grammar of the contemporary Spanish language worldwide includes several constructions that express future time. There exists a morphologic future tense, but this form is not favored in daily use in many dialects (Moreno de Alba 1977). Other forms often used to express futurity are the simple present and periphrastic future. Spanish-speaking people also utilize adverbial phrases to demonstrate futurity, though not always with a syntactically future verb. The presence of each of these constructions in speech is well-documented, but distinctions between them are not, particularly in Andalusian Spanish.

There have been several studies on the expression of futurity, mainly in American Spanish, with different results. The most extensive study was carried out by Silva Corvalán and Terrell (1989) in four Caribbean countries: Chile, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. They established that the form preferred in these dialects is the periphrastic future and that the use of the morphologic future for the modal, or probabilistic, sense varies between 18% in Puerto Rico (formal register) and 88% in the Dominican Republic.

Gutiérrez (1995) studied the occurrences of various expressions of the future among bilinguals in four cities of the United States. Considering that the minority status of Spanish in the United States accelerates changes that remain latent in dialects with majority status, Gutiérrez compared his North American data with those of two Mexican cities. He documented a reduced use of the morphologic future to talk about future events among bilingual speakers, who preferred this tense for modal uses. Gutiérrez’s data also suggest that speech register has to do with the selected form of expression, as is noted above in the reference to Puerto Rican speech.

A variety of expressions of futurity exists in the Sevillian dialect, as in others, and it is probable that selection between them is influenced as much by discursive context as by social variables. The forms analyzed are the morphologic future,

Pero tendrá que introducirse en un ambiente [C2H1] ,

the periphrastic future,

No, no lo va a poder pasar muy bien [M1V4],

the present tense indicative,

Sabe ella lo que es trabajar fuera y lo que es venir cansado [C1H2],

and the present tense subjunctive

Luego, en cuanto que termine los estudios, precisamente este año... [C1V2].

It is also possible that different constructions are correlated to particular pragmatic motivations, such as proximity. I investigate how sex, age and class influence the selection of the form of future expression and what effects the pragmatic notion of proximity has on this process in the dialect of Seville.

METHODS

To determine the usage patterns of the various expressions of futurity in Sevillian Spanish, I examined the speech of forty-eight people interviewed in the Sociolingüística andaluza: Encuestas del habla urbana de Sevilla series, edited by Vidal Lamíquiz and published by the University of Seville in three volumes. Each volume includes twenty-four native Sevillian speakers. These speakers are evenly distributed among three generations and both sexes. One socioeconomic group comprises each volume, and I analyzed the speech of the upper- and middle-level groups.

With all the instances of future expression in these interviews gathered, the analyzed linguistic variable will be the verbal form chosen by the speaker. I analyze the variable in terms of linguistic context, primarily the proximity of the future event to the speech act and the presence of future-time adverbials. I also analyze the expressions according to the age, class and sex of the speaker.

RESULTS

Modality

Overall, the data indicate that in Sevillian speech, the morphologic future tense (n=161) tends to be used mostly to express probability (63%):

No sé si será por culpa del alumno o quizás por nosotros mismos en algunos casos [C3H3].

This usage occurs across both sexes and classes and in all three age groups. The tendency to favor the modal use of the synthetic future tense is more pronounced in the middle class (71%) than it is among all speakers, but all groups use this form more often with modal motivations than with temporal ones. In terms of sex and age, the differences do not appear to be significant.

Temporality

The overall preference for expressing futurity (n=255) is more toward the periphrastic future (50%) than toward the morphological form (24%), with a higher degree of use of the morphologic future by the upper-class speakers than by middle-class speakers. Present verbal forms are used in the remaining 26% of future expressions, but the lack of a future subjunctive form in the modern language allows for syntactic motivation in subordinate clauses. Present indicative occurrences account for 13% of the data. There is no clear effect on selection by the single variable of sex; however, the speaker’s age is correlated to the selection of future expression. Speakers in the oldest age group select the morphologic future nearly twice as often as those in the middle group.

Sex

Between the two sexes, there seems little significant difference between the choices of forms for future expression. Utterances by male speakers (n=113) and by female speakers (n=142) are approximately equally likely to be of any given form. Male speakers choose the morphologic future in 20% of occurrences and the periphrastic future in 52% of occurrences. Female speakers use the synthetic form with 27% frequency and the analytic form with 46% frequency. Female speakers select the present indicative form with a somewhat lower frequency (10%) than men do (18%).

When class is considered within the sex distinction, it becomes evident that class is a greater differentiator among the speech of men than among women in Seville. While women of both the upper class and the middle class select the morphologic future in 27% of cases, middle-class men select the morphologic future at a rate (16%) less than half that of the upper-class men. Also, while the rate for middle-class women’s selection of the periphrastic future (53%) is not exactly the same as that of upper-class women (42%), the difference is much greater between middle-class (58%) and upper-class (37%) men.

Considering the age variable within sex gives very different results. Among men, the morphologic future’s temporal use is declining: the oldest speakers use it at a 39% frequency while the middle group selects it for 19% of possible occurrences, and the youngest group uses it in a fraction of these cases (9%). Young women, though, select this form more often (35%) than either the middle generation (17%) or the oldest group (30%).

Socioeconomic class

Alone, socioeconomic class appears to be a more significant correlate to future expression selection. Upper-class speakers’ future-referent utterances (n=94) are more likely to be in the morphologic future (29%) than all future-referent utterances (24%), and upper-class speakers are less likely to select the periphrastic future(40%) than all speakers (50%). Twenty-one percent of middle-class speakers’ future expressions were in the morphologic future, slightly less than the sample overall, and middle-class selection of the periphrasis was higher than the norm at 55%.

Factoring sex into these figures shows that middle-class male speakers tend to favor the periphrastic future (58%) and that their use of the present indicative (19%) is inflated at the expense of the morphologic future (16%). Upper-class male speakers tend to select the morphologic future more often (33%) than the norm, while both men (37%) and women (42%) in this socioeconomic category select the periphrastic future less.

Age

Age is the most salient single predictor for the selected form of future expression in the Sevillian dialect. Speakers in the oldest age group select the periphrastic future as often (47%) as those in the youngest age group (45%), while the middle generation selects that form in 58% of their future-referent utterances. The generational differences for morphologic future selection are also notable. Young speakers select the synthetic form for 24% of future references, and speakers in the oldest generation choose it in 33% of these instances while the middle generation uses it only 18% of the time.

Proximity

The proximity of the future event (here defined as the expectation of a future event’s taking place within the interview) had one particularly interesting effect on speakers’ selection of a future form (n=45): no speaker used a present tense verb form to refer to an action in the very near future. It may be noted that no occurrence of a [+PROXIMITY] verb occurred in a context that could require or allow a subjunctive form – only three instances were in subordinate clauses. The only permissible forms, then, were the morphologic future:

Tú me dirás a mí [M1H4]

and the periphrastic form:

Vamos a hablar de mis tíos, ¿no? [M3H1].

Between the upper- and middle-class speakers, both groups preferred the periphrastic future to discuss proximal events. The middle class used this form in 75% of instances and the upper class in just 57%. Thus, the use of the morphologic future to discuss near-future events is much reduced in the middle class (25%). As among the overall data, the upper class in this instance has a higher rate of use (43%) of the morphologic future.

Future-time adverbials

Adverbials of future time also affected verbal form selection uniquely. The presence of an explicit reference to the tense, for example “en el futuro” [C1V1] or “el día de mañana” [M3V4], allowed for a tendency toward the unmarked verbal form. Adverbials in future-referent sentences, then, did not preclude any particular forms, but they did stimulate present-tense indicative forms, as in

Y este año, pues, no sé, está la cosa a ver adonde vamos [M3H3].

Among utterances not containing future-time adverbials (n=201), the overall rate of selection for he present indicative was 7%. For sentences that did contain the adverbials (n=54), the present indicative form appeared in 35%. There was no significant difference between the present indicative selection among the middle class (35%) and the upper class (35%). Female speakers selected the present indicative slightly more often (40%) than male speakers (31%). While the middle generation selected the present tense more often (40%) than the younger speakers (26%), there were not enough data from the oldest generation (n=4) to establish patterns.

CONCLUSIONS

The modal use of the future tense is not prestigious in Seville, but it does overshadow the use of the future tense to express temporality. As far as the social variables show, this usage is stable.

It might seem that the disuse of the future tense is promoted further by the presence of future-time adverbials. These encourage the presence of unmarked present tense forms instead of more distinctly [+FUTURE] verbal forms. There is, though, no significant decrease in morphologic future use in the presence of future-time adverbials. Periphrastic future selection is reduced.

The morphologic future is the prestige variant of the future expression variable in Seville. Young women show a high usage rate relative to young men and to older women. The upper class favors the morphologic future to the other forms, indicating this form’s higher social value.

It is also apparent that the use of the morphologic future tense to express futurity is disappearing. Its frequency of use among young men is much lower than that among older and middle-aged men. The form will survive, though, due to the stability of its modal function.

REFERENCES

Gutiérrez, Manuel, 1995. “On the Future of the Future Tense in the Spanish of the Southwest.” 214-226, Carmen Silva Corvalán, Spanish in Four Continents: Studies in Language Contact and Bilingualism. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Lamíquiz, Vidal, series ed., 1983-1992. Sociolingüística andaluza: Encuestas del habla urbana de Sevilla. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla.
Moreno de Alba, José, 1977. “Vitalidad del futuro de indicativo en la norma culta del español hablado en México.” Estudios sobre el español hablado en las principales ciudades de América, Juan M. Lope Blanch, ed. 129-46. México: Universidad Autónoma de México.
Silva Corvalán, Carmen y Tracy David Terrell, 1989. “Notas sobre la expresión de futuridad en el español del Caribe.” Hispanic Linguistics. 2:2, 191-208.

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