Morphological Simplification in Latin American Spanish: The Demise of -se and the Triumph of -ra in the Past Subjunctive in Colonial New Spain

Abstract

This study focuses on the disappearance of past subjunctive -se and its replacement by -ra in colonial Latin American Spanish. For the past several centuries, the -se form seems to have been in retreat in virtually every Spanish dialect and has become virtually extinct in its nonperiphrastic form in Latin America. This process can be understood as one of the manifestations of a larger chain of events affecting the verbal system of Spanish in its transition from a medieval to a modern language and resulting in the simplification of the verbal paradigm of the Spanish subjunctive. Although significant amounts of scholarship have been dedicated to each of these processes, we are still lacking stud- ies on the circumstances of the disappearance of -se in Latin American Spanish, and it is usually assumed that this disappearance was a more or less natural consequence of the subjunctivization of -ra. In what follows, I will present the data on the distribution of nonperiphrastic -ra and -se forms in three corpora from New Spain, specifically from central Mexico, Chihuahua, and New Mexico, covering the period between 1600 and 1800. This study aims to determine whether the expansion of -ra into the realm of -se was linguistically and/or dialec- tally determined. The following analysis shows that the progressive dis- appearance of -se in colonial Latin American Spanish followed patterns of internal and external conditioning that have not yet been portrayed in the literature.