Expressing future tense in Spanish

Abstract The present investigation examines the expression of futurity (periphrastic vs. morphological future) in Spanish in corpora from Caracas, Venezuela, Mexico City, Mexico, and three cities in Spain. The results indicate that, in the Caracas and Mexico City data, the periphrastic future (PF) has been generalized as the default future expression, while the use of the morphological future (MF) has specialized as an epistemic marker of uncertainty. In Spain, on the other hand, the PF is constrained by some of its source features such as intention of the speaker and temporal proximity. As a result, the MF in Spain still enjoys much of its temporal uses. It is thus shown that, while a variable phenomenon may be constrained by the same independent predictors, the magnitude of effect, and thus the stage of linguistic change, may be different across speech communities.