Testing Twitter data on a morphosyntactic variable

Abstract

This research investigates the distribution of the morphological future cantaré (MF) and periphrastic future voy a cantar (PF) in Latin American Spanish compared to Peninsular Spanish through an analysis of Twitter data collected in six Spanish-speaking cities. Due to the written nature of the social network Twitter, rates of the MF in the data are much higher than those found in studies based on sociolinguistic interviews. While the Twitter results in our study do not confirm the alleged higher prevalence of the MF in Spain compared to Latin America, the data shows systematic variation patterns that reflect internal factor groups that have been explored in previous studies on the expression of futurity (temporal proximity to the speech act, and epistemic certainty) as well as register.