A comparison of the use and non-use of the future subjunctive in Alfonsine and 14th-century Navarro-Aragonese manuscripts

It has been argued historically that one of the main morphosyntactic differences between eastern Hispano-Romance dialects and all other dialects in the Iberian Peninsula is the prevalence in the usage of the future indicative in subordinate clauses of futurity where a present or future subjunctive might be expected in the west, as in Portuguese or Castilian. The purpose of the current study is to measure the accuracy of such pronouncements using two sizable, relevant, and varied corpora already transcribed on CD-Rom: The Electronic Texts and Concordances of the Prose Works of Alfonso X, El Sabio (Prepared by Lloyd Kasten, John Nitti, and †Wilhelmina Jonxis-Henkemans. 1997. Madison: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies) and The Electronic Texts and Concordances of Medieval Navarro-Aragonese Manuscripts (Prepared by John Nitti and Lloyd Kasten. 1997. Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies).;The project entails two basic parts, the first being largely a synthesis of what has been argued or is known about the future subjunctive in Hispano-Romance, factors which may have contributed to its decline in Castilian, and the competition it faced with the present subjunctive in western and central regions and the future indicative in the east. The second part of the study is a detailed analysis and subsequent comparison of the use and non-use of the future subjunctive in the Alfonsine and Navarro-Aragonese corpora based on data compiled from computer-generated concordance programs.