Resumo

ASRATIAN, Arucia. Variación -ra/-se en el español hablado en caracas. Boletin de Linguistica [online]. 2007, vol.19, n.27, pp.5-41. ISSN 0798-9709.

In this article we analyze the linguistic and social factors which influence the alternance between the subjunctive forms -ra and -se in the Corpus Sociolingüístico de Caracas 1987. We examine linguistic and sociolinguistic variables, such as tense, clause polarity, type of context, presence of subjunctive in the previous clause, speakers’ age, socioeconomic level and gender. The form -se is not frequent in the Caracas spoken language and the variables which contribute significantly to the use of this form are the plusquamperfect tense, negative polarity, the presence of -ra in the antecedent clause, the "protasis" and "apodosis" contexts in the conditional sentence, the third and fourth socioeconomic strata and the speakers’ age (30 to 45 years old).

Palavras-chave : subjunctive in -ra and -se; sociolinguistic variation; Venezuelan Spanish.