Morphological variation in the Spanish-speaking world

Abstract

This chapter reviews some relevant concepts and data related to the Spanish-speaking world, as well as to geographical and morphological variation. The Spanish language is well known for its rich inventory and frequent use of evaluative affixes, including diminutive, augmentative, and pejorative suffixes. The chapter focuses on variation related to inflectional morphology. In the case of inflectional morphology, variation phenomena involve different word-classes and different features: nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adverbs and quantifiers. As Fernandez-Ordonez has shown, the deflected uses of unstressed pronouns are actually alternative pronominal paradigms where pronoun selection is carried out according to linguistic principles other than those that apply in standard Spanish. The agreeing use of adverbial quantifiers is considered non-normative in descriptive grammars. As Fabregas and Gallego and Feliu Arquiola have discussed, word formation, like any other linguistic level, is also subject to variation, although it has been less studied than inflectional morphology.