Bicentenario, identidad y cambio lingüí­stico: El sistema verbal de referencia temporal futura en San Juan, Argentina, durante el siglo XIX

Abstract

In this work framed within the functional variacionist theory that relates form, motivation and culture, we want to show how the XIX century native speaker of Spanish in San Juan, Argentina, alternates between synthetic and periphrastic devices to refer to future time according to their communicative purposes. The corpus consists of family letters written between 1837 and 1889, in the "century of political independencies and the creation of new states, in which the fight for Latin American identity begins" [Majfud, 2002]. We consider that these alternate constructions are not equivalent syntactically, semantically nor pragmatically, their use being favoured by certain parameters. Of these parameters, we analyze the one through which, we believe, the periphrastic innovation "ir a + infinitivo" started. We adhere to the fact that "the functional explanations of linguistic change do not exclude but imply cultural explanations" [Coseriu, 1977]. This pragmatic approximation to linguistic use demands at the same time a qualitative and quantitative analysis. "It will not only matter what structures language contains, but also when we recur to them, and above all, how much we use when and what structure" [Garcí­a, 1995]