When Language Contact Says Nothing: A Contrastive Analysis of Queísta Structures in Two Varieties of Peninsular Spanish

Abstract

Based on the existence of some structural conflict between Spanish and Catalan in certain points of the syntax, this study tests the hypothesis about the influence of the latter on the distribution of queísmo uses (‘Me alegro que vengas’ [‘I’m glad you come’]) in the Spanish spoken in an eastern peninsular variety in contact with Catalan. Using the tools of comparative sociolinguistics, and the analysis of three corpora of contemporary Spanish, the study exhaustively examines the conditioning of this variable. The starting hypothesis is that the influence of the contact can be inferred from the comparison between different magnitudes derived from a multivariable statistical analysis. In addition to several linguistic and extra-linguistic predictors previously analysed in the literature, we also take into account other factor groups that may be particularly informative about that potential influence. Thus, from a structural point of view, we consider the contrast between: a) conjunctive queísmo in verbal structures, in which the structural conflict with Spanish is more evident (‘me acuerdo (de) que vino con su mujer/em recorde Ø que va vindre amb la seua dona’ [‘I remember that he came with his wife’]; and b) pronominal queísmo in relative sentences, in which the coincidence between both languages is greater (‘el día (en) que nos conocimos / el día (en) què ens vam conéixer’). From an extralinguistic perspective, the incidence of two additional factors is also examined: a) the speech community (without contact (Madrid/Alcalá) vs. in contact (Castellón), and b) the main language of the speakers (Spanish/Catalan-Valencian). The results of several mixed-effect regression analyses performed do not support the hypothesis of contact. The distributional differences between the above-mentioned groups are minimal, and in no case significant. On the other hand, the variation is basically affected by the same structural and non-structural predictors, regardless of the speech community or the ethnolinguistic group examined. Even the few divergences that are observed point in a direction contrary to that expected by the contact hypothesis. The study concludes with some potential explanations about these results and the contrast with other cases of syntactic convergence with Catalan.