| This dissertation constitutes a sociolinguistic study of the expressions of futurity and possession in the Colombian Spanish spoken in Barranquilla, Colombia and in New York City. I discuss language contact and the ways in which it affects the languages involved. Then, I provide a description of Colombian Spanish in which I highlight its main dialects as well as its most salient phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features. I subsequently describe my research procedures, the data, and the speakers who provided the data for this study, and I establish the distributions of forms used respectively in the expressions of futurity and nominal possession in the two populations under study. Additionally, I identify the linguistic and social constraints which significantly affect the expressions of futurity and possession and explain the impact of these constraints.; The results of this study indicate evidence for ongoing change in progress which appears to be accelerated in the New York Colombian community. In general, the results for both variables in Barranquilla and in New York reveal the complex interaction of linguistic and social constraints. In both variables we have analytical forms which represent innovations, and both of these analytical forms are used more frequently in New York City than in Barranquilla. The Spanish spoken by the two populations in this study is still recognizably Colombian Spanish despite some minor differences. However, the evolution of the expression of futurity is much more advanced than of the expression of possession. While the evidence for a change in progress in the expression of futurity is fairly substantial, it is less conclusive in the case of the expression of possession. Whether this current variation constitutes an ongoing change in progress remains an open question. |
