Form and Meaning: Studies of Grammatical Variation and Communicative Choice in Spanish

This book is a collection of studies dealing with phenomena of grammatical variation in Spanish, including verbal tense and mood, syntactic ordering, and the use of defocusing constructions. They all approach variation and choice as grounded on the functional and cognitive bases of grammar, pursuing meaning as the path to scientific explanation.

This book presents a state-of-the-art study of variation that considers meaning-in all its possible facets-as the key to scientific explanation. It brings together a group of international scholars whose work pursues the systematic integration of meaning and function in models of grammatical usage. After a foreword by the world-leading specialist Nikolas Coupland and a theoretical introduction by editors Miguel A. Aijón Oliva and María José Serrano, the seven empirical chapters focus on morphosyntactic phenomena in different varieties of Spanish, analyzing a wide range of discourse types and communicative domains, from sociolinguistic interviews to mass media and social network interactions. These studies offer a basis for the study of variation from similar viewpoints in other languages.