Spanish spoken in the United States is often perceived as unstable and not as complex as the legitimized language use of monolingual speakers.This perception is closely linked to the belief that U.S. Spanish, as a bilingual variety, is more variable than monolingual Spanish and subject to change due to the influence of English, the dominant language. However, without systematic and rigorous investigation, such a belief is merely speculative.
Mood selection, which refers to the choice between indicative and subjunctive grammatical moods, has been a fruitful diagnostic feature for examining contact-induced change, particularly as subjunctive is observed to be in disuse in English. In US Spanish, bilingual speakers are commonly believed to extend the use of indicative to contexts traditionally requiring subjunctive—a phenomenon typically interpreted as simplification driven by contact with English.
With this in mind, this talk explores variation, contact, and systematicity in U.S. Spanish by analyzing mood selection in complement clauses used by Spanish-English bilinguals in Southern Arizona. More often than not, overall rates are interpreted as suggesting subjunctive simplification, and differences across groups with varying levels of contact with English point to contact as the main factor driving this simplification.This presentation, however, reveals a more comprehensive picture of mood variation by integrating different complementary analyses that assess the impact of both linguistic and extralinguistic factors on the variable. Findings show that, ultimately, most of the variation in the dataset is explained by linguistic factors, with governor effects playing a central role in shaping mood selection within the community. Expanding on previous variationist research, the combination of complementary analyses discussed in this talk provides additional strong evidence that counters misconceptions about subjunctive simplification, highlighting its vitality, complexity, and systematicity as integral components of the linguistic repertoire of U.S. Spanish speakers.