The Imperfect Subjunctive in Chilean Spanish: Is There Free Alternation between -ra and -se Desinences?

Abstract

This article studies desinences found in the imperfect subjunctive in Chilean Spanish, by means of the statistical description of -ra and -se verb endings that appear in the Corpus Básico del Español de Chile (Castillo Fadi´c, 2012). Through the analysis of different variables, and based on computational linguistics, corpus linguistics and lexical-statistical tools, we intend to define if these desinences, considered as variants of the same morphological variable, alternate freely or correlate with other variables. Results show the existence of a correlation between the morphological variable studied in the article and the textual world. In addition, grammatical and lexical-semantic factors that may influence on the choice of one or another variant are explored; it would be necessary to study these in depth considering a larger sample.