ABSTRACT
Futurity is expressed in Spanish by means of a tripartite linguistic variable consisting of the morphological future, the simple present, and the periphrastic future. The current study explores the effects of the predictors that most strongly condition the expression of futurity in the monolingual speech community of Barranquilla, Colombia, as well as among Colombian and Puerto Rican residents of metropolitan New York City. The distribution of futurity variants features the periphrastic future as the most frequent and the morphological future as the least used variant. Futurity is conditioned by an intricate combination of internal and external predictors, including length of morphological future inflection, temporal distance, adverbial specification, speaker’s sex, and age. The social conditioning reflects an apparent-time effect with the use of the periphrastic future increasing as age decreases. Concurrently, the morphological future is favored by older speakers, whereas it is becoming absent from younger speakers’ linguistic repertoires, especially in communities where Spanish is in contact with English.
