Eliciting evidence of functional differences

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an online questionnaire carried out among 130 respondents from Santiago de Chile, Chile, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, and contrasts them with the results from a previous corpus data analysis. That study demonstrated formal and functional differentiation between free-standing que -clauses with subjunctive mood, i.e. displaced directives , and the morphological imperative in conversations among native speakers of Spanish in terms of the range of speech acts and degree of prototypicality within the category of directives. In this paper, the corpus analysis is tested against elicited data. Attention is paid to the role played by different types of addressees, to the semantics of the verbs used, and to the role of repetition and degree of agentivity of the subject in the selection of an imperative or a free-standing que -clause. The findings confirm that there is essentially a functional division of labor between the two, with most overlap in the specific context of the repetition of a directive addressed to a second person.

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