The scope of language contact as a constraint factor in language change: The periphrasis haber de plus infinitive in a corpus of language immediacy in modern Spanish

2.1. An age-old change in progress in the Spanish syntax: the haber de/tener que plus infinitive alternation

The origins of modal periphrases of obligation lie in the corresponding Latin constructions with the verbs debeo and habeo, which were joined at a later stage by others formed with the verb teneo, given its semantic and functional ties with habeo. The periphrases with habere did not require any kind of complementiser between their elements in classical Latin, but both in the later period of this language and later still in the proto-Romance era several prepositions began to appear. This development took place in order to highlight their modal meaning and differentiate it from the mere future temporality that was arising from the grammaticalisation of the ancient periphrasis (Gili Gaya, 1970, p. 112).

According to Yllera (1980, pp. 100–101), the periphrases with haber had a broad modal value in the early days of Castilian Spanish and expressed both necessity and obligation in a general sense. They also indicated a number of more precise shades of meaning (moral obligation, attenuated necessity, obligation based on the law or custom, etc.), in some cases even alternating with deber. Lapesa (2000, p. 882) also discussed these obligative shades of meaning and added others with a basically prospective value, together with some more sporadic ones of a pleonastic nature, where neither obligation nor futurity seems to play any kind of role at all. Nevertheless, by the end of the mediaeval period these latter meanings had disappeared, and the periphrasis was left for centuries as the dominant expression for stating obligative and, to a lesser extent, futural contents.

On the other hand, the appearance of tener as an auxiliary verb in distributions that are analogous to those formed with haber has been associated with the process of grammaticalisation and semantic neutralisation of the two verbs that was to take place as of the Middle Ages. In this respect, Hernández Díaz (2006) noted that the language change that occurred between the 12th and 16th centuries was determined by a number of (semantic, but also syntactic and pragmatic) factors. This lexical erosion of haber was undoubtedly furthered by its widespread usage as an auxiliary in the formation of compound tenses (haber + past participle) and its extension as an existential and impersonal verb (haber que + infinitive). In any event, as of the late Middle Ages, the obligative periphrases with the auxiliary tener, as well as some other modal and futural uses, ended up becoming firmly consolidated in Castilian Spanish (mainly with the variant tener de in the case of the futural uses, (Blas Arroyo & González, 2014; Blas Arroyo, 2015). The same phenomenon also occurred in other Romance languages, as in some southern Italian dialects, Portuguese, Gallician and Astur-Leonese and even, albeit more sporadically, in Catalan (see below).

It has been observed, that the case of tener que is unusual among the personal infinitive verb periphrases due to the fact that it is the only construction in which the two parts are not joined by a preposition (Pountain, 2001). Moreover, Olbertz (1998, p. 250) stated that, in relation to this combination, there are two types of syntactic structures, exemplified by those in phrases (5) and (6) below. Yet only in the first one is there what we could call a true periphrasis in the strictest sense, although the second—in which a direct object depending of tener is interspersed between the verb and the complementiser—may well have played a significant role in its origins (Gómez Torrego, 1988; Gutiérrez, 1980; Olbertz, 1998; Pountain, 2001; Sinner, 2003):

(5) Pues tengo que haceros esta advertencia: ya que tenéis tanto tiempo libre, ¿por qué no lo empleáis leyendo, escribiendo y haciendo cuentas? (Francia no nos llamó)

[Thus I have to give you this word of warning: since you have so much free time, why don’t you put it to good use reading, writing and doing sums?]

(6) Pues tengo esta advertencia que haceros…

[Thus I have to give you this word of warning…]

The history of the Spanish syntax is at the same time the history of an age-old change in progress by which tener que has been replacing haber de in modal obligative contexts. At first glance, this change can be noticed after comparing the frequencies of use of both periphrases in some diachronic macro-corpus. Thus, in Table 1 we show the figures found by López Izquierdo (2008, p. 793) in the 100 million words Corpus del español (Davis, 2002) between the 15th and 20th centuries. Leaving aside the possibility that a number of not truly periphrastic combinations can have been accounted for in these counts, the figures speak for themselves and confirm the existence of an important evolution in this grammatical paradigm. At the same time, the table reveals that the variation between the two periphrases is very stable until the 18th century, and only from the 19th century seems to move forward. Nevertheless, in this period haber de continues to be prevalent, in contrast to what happened in the following decades of the 20th century, when things changed radically. ³

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Table 1.

Frequencies of use of Haber de / tener que plus infinitive by centuries in the Corpus del Español (Source: López Izquierdo, 2008, p. 793).

	15th		16th		17th		18th		19th		20th
	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
haber de	2339	86.5	17643	90	17329	90.9	4963	85.6	8458	76	1492	13
tener de/que	366	13.5	1915	10	1736	9.1	820	14.1	2680	24	9894	87

Our own figures, obtained in a time span of five centuries (16th to 20th) from a 3.5 million word corpus of immediacy texts, initially show some differences in these magnitudes (Table 2). Thus, after comparing Tables 1 and 2 it seems that, in the discursive traditions closer to orality, the ratio of haber de in the 19th century is significantly higher than in other more formal texts mostly represented in canonical macro-corpus at use (24% vs. 42.6%). Nevertheless, with all these differences of degree in mind, both tables agree on the stabilisation of the variable in the early centuries, as well as in the abrupt overtaking of haber de in the 20th century. At the same time, a variationist comparative analysis of the last two centuries allowed us to confirm how severe this change has been, both in general terms as in virtually all the linguistic contexts analysed (Blas Arroyo & Vellón (in preparation)).

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Table 2.

Frequencies of use of Haber de / tener de/que plus infinitive by centuries in a 3.5 million word corpus of immediacy texts.

	16th		18th		19th		20th
	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
haber de	1584	91.5	693	89	162	57.4	272	26.1
tener que/de	168	9.5	86	11	120	42.6	771	73.9

However, a careful study of the linguistic envelop of the variation allows us to confirm the existence of certain loci in the grammar system that still exert some favourable action in the selection of haber de in the 20th century. An even more significant finding is that both the factor groups and the hierarchy of constraints that operated in this century were identical to those that have functioned in the past. Nevertheless, with odd exceptions, some generalised decrease in the explanatory power of these factor groups is observed, as well as some signs of lexicalisation with a chunk of few lexical contexts, such as ser and several verba dicendi, mainly when they are used with a phatic meaning and in some specific contexts (see section 4 below).

As a result of a long process of grammaticalisation, sharply accelerated in the first half of the 20th century, the periphrasis haber de plus infinitive has been relegated to some restricted areas of the grammar and the lexicon in front of tener que, that seems to have almost definitely won the battle in this age-long case of variation and change. What we are considering now is whether this framework is distributed regularly from a dialectal point of view or, on the contrary, some differences can be observed among the Spanish varieties of several peninsular regions. And, if that latter scenario comes true, whether these differences can be related to the existence of structural points of conflict between Spanish and other Romance languages in which similar forms—but not always similar functions—are present. In the next section, we will see in detail some of these (dis)similarities, leaving for a later section (section 5) its theoretical implications in the light of the results obtained in the variationist study.

2.2. Tener que and haber de in other peninsular languages

Two Romance languages that share modal infinitive verb periphrases with Castilian are Gallician and Astur-Leonese. In reference to the first, Rojo (1974) pointed out that the fundamental value of the constructions with haber (which are possible with the prepositions de and a, although they also occur alone) is the expression of futurity. This is especially the case in the present and imperfect indicative, where this periphrastic expression even surpasses other prospective variants such as the morphological future (in this same sense, see Álvarez et al. (1998), Álvarez Caccamo (1983), and Kabatek (1996)). Nevertheless, and as pointed out by Sinner (2003, p. 2001), sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between a futural shade of meaning and a mere obligation, since they are notions that are very often linked together. In fact, for Álvarez et al. (1998, p. 406) ‘it can be said that in some cases temporality is the most important thing and in others obligation predominates’ (our translation). Moreover, these authors also highlight the existence of epistemic senses with the periphrasis that can also be found in Castilian Spanish: ‘Ese rapaz ha de andar polos quince anos’ [That guy has to be fifteen years old]. Yet, in a study on linguistic attitudes, Kabatek (1996, p. 136) observed how the dominant Gallego-speaking population tended to reject the modal, not futural, values more often than speakers who were more influenced by Castilian Spanish. Furthermore, according to some linguists, this temporal mark left by the Gallego haber de makes itself felt in the Spanish spoken in that community, although apart from some more or less well-founded intuitions, the data available are fragmented and not very representative (García, 1976; Iglesias, 1969; Rojo, 1974, p. 83, 2004, p. 1095; Seco, 1986, p. 214). Following an analysis of several interviews carried out in Santiago de Compostela, Sinner (2003) noted that the futural value is not very representative, although it still appears occasionally, unlike the case of other control groups (inhabitants of Madrid and Catalonia) in which it never occurs.

In contrast, the periphrases with tener in Gallego fall squarely within the realm of the deontic modality (Rojo, 1974, p. 70), thus showing themselves to be much closer to the corresponding Castilian ones.

The semantic distribution of these periphrases is similar in another north-western Romance language, namely Astur-Leonese. Thus, the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana (2001) draws our attention to the optional alternation of the periphrases with haber, with the prepositions a and de, to express either futurity or obligation, even with specific uses that are close to those found in Gallego (Kabatek, 1996, p. 136), such as the future of imminence (‘en tal peligru me vi qu’hubi morrer’) [I saw myself in such danger that I wanted to die]. And the combinations with tener (also with the alternating complementiser de and que, as in Gallego) are stated as being used in an obligative sense in which there is also ‘a clear futural shade of meaning’ (our translation).

Catalan, on the other hand, offers a different scenario. Although in the mediaeval period this language contained several examples of tenir de plus infinitive, which alternated within the sphere of modality with the more usual forms haver de and haver a, they soon disappeared. Hence, the far more recent uses of tenir que plus infinitive have been condemned time and again as an unacceptable syntactic Castilianism that does not form part of the normative language. Thus, Badia (1983, p. 391) noted how, in addition to other interferences in this area of modality: ‘… other Castilianisms are common in obligative constructions: the Castilian “tengo que decir” is translated by tinc que dir [unacceptable], rather than haug (or he) de dir or cal que jo digui’ (in the same sense, see Marvà (1983) and Payrató (1985)).

This absence of tener que in the periphrastic paradigm of Catalan has been proposed as being the reason underlying the hyper-representation of haber de in the Castilian Spanish of Catalonia and other Catalan-speaking regions, with respect to other areas of the peninsula (Blas Arroyo, 2004; Hernández García, 1998; Martínez Díaz, 2002, 2003, 2008; Sinner, 2003, 2004; Sinner and Wesch, 2008; Wesch, 1997). The empirical results of this presence, however, are far from being unanimous and vary from one study to another. Thus, Sinner (2003) noted that, when moving from the written language to a corpus of oral interviews, the average uses of haber de drop from a high figure of 43.3% to just 4%. Martínez Díaz (2008), on the other hand, raises these frequencies to 17% (N = 9) in the Corpus del español conversacional de Barcelona y su área metropolitana [Corpus of conversational Spanish from Barcelona and its metropolitan area] (2001), although these also contrast with the much higher figures for tener que (83%; N = 43). Yet, other authors, such as Wesch (1994, pp. 173–174) and Hernández García (1998, p. 578), detected higher figures in other oral corpora. Furthermore, the use of haber de in Catalonia today could have a far from negligible identity-based component or, at least, be a faithful reflection of some of the notable outcomes of the linguistic policies of recent years. Thus, as stated by Martínez Díaz (2003, p. 690): ‘the frequency of use of the periphrasis “haber de plus infinitive” in the Spanish of Catalonia is not the same in all informants. Knowledge of the normative variety of the Catalan language interferes with the subvariety of Spanish but essentially in those speakers who have been educated in Catalan or who have learnt Catalan at school’ (our translation) (for other phenomena in the same line in these regions of the peninsula, see Vann (2002) and Blas Arroyo (2008)).

In summary, from what we have seen above, it can be deduced that different Romance languages on the peninsula present different points of contact, but also some points of structural conflict within the paradigms of personal infinitive verb periphrases, which could justify differences in the use made of them in the Spanish of different dialectal areas. Thus, while all the languages present infinitive verb periphrases with the verb haber (sometimes with different alternating complementisers), the same cannot be said for tener, which is absent from Catalan grammar except for some recent uses that are clearly syntactic calques from Castilian Spanish. Furthermore, the uses of haber in the north-western languages, such as Gallician and Astur-Leonese, do express obligative values, but these are less idiosyncratic than the futural ones, which are also shared by Spanish and Catalan, although to a lesser degree.

To what extent can these structural differences condition the uses of the periphrases haber de and tener que plus infinitive in the different dialectal areas of the Spanish language? How have those constraint factors evolved over the last two centuries? To answer these questions we will conduct a study according to the principles and methods of historical sociolinguistics (Conde Silvestre, 2007; Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg, 2003, 2012) and, more specifically, to those which addresses the study of variation and change from a variationist and comparative perspective (Poplack, Zentz, & Dion, 2012; Tagliamonte, 2012).

4.1. General data

The total number of periphrases was 1326, although they were distributed in a very irregular manner, since 78% (N = 1044) were from the first six decades of the 20th century, while only the remaining 22% came from the 19th century (N = 282). The fact that the corpus from this century was considerably smaller (about 200,000 words, as we have seen) does not in itself justify a difference which we have not been able to find a plausible explanation for.

Of these periphrases, 831 (70.8%) contain tener que, ⁴ as opposed to 342 (29.2%) with haber de. Yet, this distribution also varies notably on the diachronic axis, as can be seen in Figure 1, which shows the uses of haber de in four different periods: 19th century, first and second half, and 20th century, first and second third.

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Figure 1.

Frequency of usage of haber de plus infinitive in different periods of the 19th and 20th centuries in a corpus of communicative immediacy (%).

To a lesser extent, the differences in frequency can also be observed on the diatopic plane, a fact that can be evaluated using the different dialectal sources of the texts in the corpus. For the purposes of this study, the corpus was initially divided into the following sets:

Nevertheless, of these latter areas, two have been isolated independently with the aim of performing a more accurate analysis of the potential influence that language contact has on the variation phenomenon we are dealing with here. Thus, we distinguish between the following subsets:

b.1) varieties from the Catalan-speaking territories (today’s autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Valencian Region, and the Balearic Isles, although there are no testimonies from this last area in the corpus), whose autochthonous language shares multiple uses of haber de with Castilian Spanish but lacks a second alternative periphrasis (tener que), unless we can count a recent syntactic Castilianism that the normative grammar strongly rejects, and

b.2) north-western bilingual regions, more specifically Galicia and Asturias, whose Romance languages include the two periphrastic forms in their verbal repertoire, although with some idiosyncratic semantic values that do not always coincide with those of Castilian Spanish, as we saw earlier (see section 2).

The initial results of the analysis concerning this dialectal distribution show the following (see Figure 2):

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Figure 2.

Frequency of the usage of haber de plus infinitive by periods and dialectal origin of writers (%) (Note: there are no data available for the Catalan groups (first half of the 19th century) and Galician-Asturian (second third of the 20th century).

As can be seen in Figure 2, that loss of prominence is especially intense in the monolingual group, where the selection of haber de falls sharply from frequencies above 60% in the 19th century to a little over 8% in the second third of the next century. Nevertheless, this decline is also just as significant in the north-western bilingual areas, whose distributional profile also veers sharply away from the far gentler change undergone by the areas within the Catalan-speaking territories.

4.2. Temporal uses of the periphrasis

One preliminary hypothesis to account for the initially unexpected behaviour of the Gallego-Asturiano bilingual group leads us to consider the potential influence of some of the futural uses of the periphrases. Together with the modal contents, in the corpus there are also others in which the periphrases have no modal value whatsoever, or they are now very diluted in favour of the expression of merely temporal shades of meaning. It is true that the actual modal meaning often implicitly contains a temporal value, since most of these periphrases possess an ingressive or inchoative aspectual value that, by nature, points towards futurity. Nevertheless, the speaker sometimes leaves the modal aspect to one side and his or her utterance appears to be intended as just a means to formulate facts situated in some future time, as can be seen in the following examples:

(7) …y esperando ocasión oportuna para pagarle esta deuda de gratitud. Vamos, que se ha de alegrar con la nueva que va a oír (Cartas de San Enrique de Ossó)

[…and awaiting the occasion to pay him this debt of gratitude. I mean, he has to be pleased with the new one he is going to hear]

(8) Tú, María, no te muevas de ahí mientras no vaya yo; si no, no he de ir a verte aunque estés en Pamplona (Once cartas de mi padre)

[You, Maria, don’t you move from there while I am not there; otherwise, I shall not go and see you even though you are in Pamplona]

At this point, it should be remembered that in old and classical Castilian Spanish these futural values were relatively important. Thus, according to some studies based on literary texts from different periods, the periphrasis haber de plus infinitive went from being used with its future value in 17% of cases in Cervantes’ Entremeses and 18% in Lope de Vega’s comedies to just 1% in the drama of the second half of the 20th century (Sáez-Godoy, 1968). Furthermore, some authors have drawn attention to the fact that such values have survived to a greater extent in American speech forms than in European ones (De Bruyne, 1993; Kany, 1969; Steel, 1982; Westmoreland, 1997). The temporal non-modal meanings also appear, although with less frequency, in periphrases with tener, and more specifically in those that employ the preposition (tener de) as the complementiser between the auxiliary and the main verb (Yllera, 1980; Blas Arroyo & González, 2014). Yet, our data show that, at least in the last two centuries, the future is almost categorically associated with haber de, and the periphrases with tener are excluded from this semantic sphere.

Now, as we saw earlier (see section 2), the futural uses of the periphrases that utilise the verb haber are not restricted to Spanish. In fact, they are especially characteristic in other Romance languages, such as European Portuguese (although not so in the Brazilian variety, where it is considered archaic), as well as several Spanish languages, like Gallician and Astur-Leonese. Accordingly, if the influence of language contact is relevant on this point, we would expect there to be a difference favouring the north-western speech forms over the other two groups, i.e. both the monolinguals and—even more—the bilinguals. However, the results do not endorse this dialectal differentiation, since the temporal uses are distributed almost categorically over the three groups: monolinguals (100%; N = 33), Gallego-Asturiano (97%; N = 28), and Catalan (92%; N = 34). Yet, where these differences are seen to be significant is, again, on the diachronic axis. Hence, these merely prospective values drop from a far from negligible 21% in the 19th century to just 5% in the 20th century, but again with very small differences between the three groups: monolinguals (19th: 20.5%; 20th: 4.5%), Gallego-Asturiano (19th: 23%; 20th: 5.3%), and Catalan (19th: 23.8%; 20th: 5.5%).

4.3. Variation in the sphere of modality

4.3.1. Epistemic and expressive modal senses

So, discarding the unequal use of the periphrasis with a futural value across the different regions of Spain, our interest now focuses on analysing its modal uses, which represent 91% of all the occurrences of the variable. Some of these usages, such as phrases (9) and (10), express epistemic contents, related with the notions of probability or conjecture, and which can be neutralised with other modal infinitive verb periphrases, this time with the verb deber (Gómez Torrego, 1999, p. 3353):

(9) …conque sale por consecuencia que mi ermana havia de tener oculto lo que menos ese caudal (Muestra documental del castellano norteño)

[…which in consequence means that my sister must have had at least that amount hidden away]

(10) …el cartero leía las cartas y no faltaban más que tres sin haber aparecido la tuya aún, aunque no perdía la confianza de que tenía que estar allí por ser ya hoy jueves (Once cartas)

[…the postman read the letters and when there were only three left yours had still not appeared, although I continued to trust that it had to be there because today is Thursday]

Thus, in the early 19th century, the Basque writer of a letter addressed to a friend expressed in phrase (9) an assumption about the amount of money that his sister must have hidden away. Meanwhile, in phrase (10), the Navarre soldier who during the Spanish civil war writes to his wife, tells her how, despite having no certainty, he had the presentiment that her long-awaited letter had arrived that day, because ‘today it’s Thursday’ (then, the usual day to receive mail in the front).

Nevertheless, the level of representativeness of these epistemic modal shades of meaning is low (5%), both for haber de (N = 42) and, even more so, for tener que (N = 22), with figures that are a long way from those obtained by deber (de) plus infinitive. As we have seen elsewhere, for the same dates as those addressed in this study, the figures are three times higher (N = 212) (Blas Arroyo & Vellón, 2014).

Lower still is the degree of representativeness of these verbal constructions to express different shades of meaning, such as surprise, indignation, obviousness, etc., which endow them with a particular expressive emphasis (Gómez Torrego, 1999, p. 3356). This is the case, for instance, of phrase (11), where the author of a letter writes to someone about the contradiction that would result from acting now in a different way to how he in the past. Or in phrase (12), where the sender of another letter writes to tell a nephew the reasons why he is so fond of him. Yet, there are 13 examples of these shades of meaning for haber de versus just 4 for tener que:

(11) Si yo me acusé de dicha falta ¿cómo he de presentar descargos? (Carta familiar de D. José Butrón)

[If I accused myself of such a fault, how am I to present a case for the defence?]

(12) …para mí eres mucho más que un sobrino pero porque te ayudé a criar, te tuve muchas veces en mis brazos y entonces cómo no tengo que tenerte cariño (As cartas do destino)

[…you are far more than a nephew to me but because I helped bring you up, I held you many times in my arms and so how can I not be fond of you]

The scarcity of these epistemic and expressive uses of the periphrases contrasts with the deontic values, which are related with notions of obligation or necessity, and where most of the periphrastic uses that interest us here are concentrated (85%; N = 1115). And this is the section where the differences among the areas used in the corpus can be seen most clearly, with the Catalan-speaking regions (34%) doubling the percentages of haber de of the monolingual areas (18%) and with values three times the indices obtained in the north-western bilingual territories (10%). But what is the tenor of these differences? Do they affect the envelope of variation, that is, the linguistic and extralinguistic conditioning of periphrases? Or, to put it another way, is the grammar underlying this variation different in one or any of these dialectal areas?

To answer these questions, in the following we present the findings from three independent variable rules analyses performed for each of these regions. Table 3 shows the results of these analyses, which take into account the incidence on the variation of a number of different linguistic, stylistic, and social factors when they are all considered at the same time. As we shall see, despite the above-mentioned differences in frequency, there is a notable degree of consistency among the results from the three groups. This would confirm the fact that, except for the odd exception (which as we shall see are also revealing), the processes of variation and language change in all of them are conditioned by similar factors.

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Table 3.

Three independent variable rule analysis for the selection of haber de plus infinitive in three dialect areas of peninsular Spanish (Goldvarb 3.0).

Factors	Monolingual regions			Bilingual Catalan-speaking areas			Bilingual north-western-speaking areas
	P	%	N	P	%	N	P	%	N
Century
19th	.81	62.3	71	.78	60.2	53	.86	57.7	15
20th	.31	13.6	30	.41	35.8	105	.37	15.8	68
Range	50			37			49
Manner of verbal action
Estative verbs	.29	25.7	36	.60	47.5	67	.48	21.6	33
Verba dicendi	.74	37.2	16	.78	46.6	27	.76	21.4	12
Verbs of movement	.45	23.3	14	.17	24.6	14	.24	12.5	7
Other verbs	.74	37.4	34	.42	40	50	.51	16.1	31
Range	45			61			52
Modal senses
Internal oblig.	.26	13.3	6	.34	42.4	25	.72	20	14
External oblig.	.47	18.1	30	.58	33.7	64	.39	8.2	20
Necessity/Convenience	.44	25.4	16	.32	30.8	24	.45	9.2	8
Other	.94	59.3	16	.86	72.2	13	.92	61.9	13
Range	68			52			53
Verb tense and mood
Present indicative	.59	34.6	71	.71	53.5	114	.54	21.4	62
Imperf. Indicative	.65	52.5	21	.39	37	10	.72	21.2	11
Future indicative	.09	5.9	1	.61	54.8	23	.41	12	3
Other	.29	11	8	.11	11.1	10	.21	7.8	7
Range	56			60			51
Level of (im)personalisation
Active sentences	.45	27.6	88	.45	38.5	135		17.7	80
Passives-impersonal sentences	.97	81.2	13	.86	76.7	23		75	3
Range	53			41			–
Type of clause
Subordinated		34.1		.61	45.5	102	.62	25.6	69
Other		24		.35	35.7	56	.32	7.5	14
Range	–			26			30
Style
Intimate letters	.39	20.7	43	.09	9.8	12		16.3	65
Distant letters	.75	61	25	.61	53.4	62		16.7	1
Non-epistolary (autobiographical) texts	.62	40.2	33	.83	59.2	84		32.7	17
Range	36			74			–
Socio-cultural level
Low		11.2	14	.23	16.7	6	.38	10	30
Middle		27.4	31	.35	33.3	11	.72	34	38
High		54.9	50	.56	45.3	141	.74	32	10
Range	–			33			36
Age
Young cohorts		24.2		.17	26.5	22		18.9	63
Adult cohorts		34.4		.61	48.7	135		12.5	12
Range	–			44			–

4.4. Manner of verbal action

The significance of this factor in infinitive verb periphrases at different moments in the history of the Spanish language has been noted in several previous works (Blas Arroyo, Porcar & Vellón, 2014; Blas Arroyo & González, 2014; Balasch, 2008, 2012). This same importance can now be seen in the alternation between haber de and tener que during the 19th and 20th centuries, a period in which it is selected as significant in the three dialectal groups under study. Moreover, the three groups fully agree as regards which verbs (dis)favour each variant the most. Thus, the verba dicendi are the contexts that most favour the selection of these periphrases with haber de, with surprisingly similar P values in the three dialectal areas. As we revealed in a previous study (Blas Arroyo & Vellón (in preparation)), some kind of lexicalisation can be observed with these verbs, especially in the 20th century data, to the point that many of the more frequent main verbs accompanying these periphrases correspond to such verba dicendi. In descending order of frequency, this is the case of decir [to say], saber [to know], confesar [to confess], reconocer [to recognise], expresar [to express], escribir [to write], agradecer [thanks], and juzgar [judge]. Especially significant is the case of decir [to say], that also figured among the most frequent verbs with haber de in the past but at considerably lower rates, as can be accounted for by the fact that it has passed from 13th position in the 19th century to the 2nd position a century later. Moreover, a more detailed analysis of these verbs show how many of the periphrastic uses appear in what we described above as ‘phatic’ context, as in phrase (21), in which the speaker seems to rely on his necessity or desire to ‘enter in communication’ (Gómez Manzano, 1992, p. 160; Gómez Torrego, 1999, p. 3354), a particularly common context in the epistolary genre.

(21) Por lo que a nuestro querido y llorado José María se refiere, he de decirles que lo he tenido muy presente en la Santa Misa (Cartas de un requeté)

[As our beloved José María is concerned, I must tell you that he had a strong presence in the Mass officiated by me]

Now, we are in a position to confirm that this lexicalisation effect, that has been related to the loss of productivity of a receding variant in advanced stages of language change (Poplack & Dion 2009, Elsig 2009, p. 19) is very congruently distributed in our corpus, as it can be deduced from the high and similar factor weight obtained by this constraint in all dialectal areas.

This same congruency can be perceived, on the opposite side, among the verbs of movement, which—with the odd exception of ir [to go]—are by far the main verbs that least frequently combine with the auxiliary haber (and, in contrast, those that do so most often with tener). Now, although it is true that the figures are low in all cases, they are especially so in the Catalan group (17), which explains why the explanatory range of this factor in this dialectal area is higher (61) than in the others. The behaviour of the stative verbs also differs in the Catalan case, with a positive influence (.60) that does not appear in the other two groups.

4.5. Verb tense and mood

We find ourselves before a new significant factor, both in the sample as a whole and in each of the dialectal areas that were analysed.

The first thing that should be noted about this syntactic factor is the important unbalance offered by the different conjugation paradigms in the sample. Thus, the present indicative (i.e tenemos que/hemos de) is a hyper-represented form in all the groups (with percentages above 60%), followed at a considerable distance by the imperfect subjunctive (i.e. teníamos que/habíamos de) (with values close to 10%), the future simple (i.e. tendremos que/habremos de) (7%), and, even further behind, the other 11 verbal paradigms. Of these, only 5% (N = 62) are in the subjunctive mood (i.e. tengamos que/hayamos de), a percentage that is similar to that of periphrases in which the auxiliary verb has been replaced by a non-finite form (infinitive and gerund—there are no examples of participles) (i.e. tener, teniendo que/haber, habiendo que). The others are indicative forms. For the regression analysis, we reduced the 11 paradigms to 4, those consisting of the present, imperfect, and future indicative, on the one hand, and the rest of the forms, on the other. The latter were included in a single group not only because they were less represented in the corpus, but also above all owing to the clear preference most of them displayed to tener que, as revealed by the initial examination of frequencies.

The results of the multivariate analysis again offer notable amounts of congruence, which shows that this is not only one of the most significant factors for explaining the variation, but also that its magnitude is very similar in the three dialectal areas (range between 50–60). Moreover, some additional regularities were also discovered within the factor. Thus, in all the areas, the present indicative exerts a positive influence on the selection of haber de, although it is significantly more pronounced in the Catalan group (.71) than among the monolingual group (.59) and the north-western bilingual group (.54). Similarly, there is a strong coincidence in the negative influence exerted upon the periphrasis by the minority paradigms included in the category ‘Others’, with very low values (below .30) in all cases.

Some divergences are also observed, however, in relation to the other two factors, where the Catalan group again displays a behaviour that is different to that of the other two. Hence, whereas the future forms in the north-western bilingual group (.41), but about all, in the monolingual (.09) group, disfavour the selection of haber de, the opposite happens in the Catalan areas (.61). And on the contrary, the imperfect indicative disfavours the periphrasis in these varieties of the Catalan-speaking territories (.38), in opposition to what occurs in the other peninsular regions (monolingual: .65; north-western bilingual: .72).

4.6. Other linguistic factors

This group also includes other factors whose explanatory significance has been corroborated by the regression analysis in two of the dialectal groups, but rejected in the third. The differences in frequency with regard to this last case, however, are in the same line as those observed in the other two, so we cannot therefore rule out a possible effect upon the result due to certain insufficiencies in the sample.

This latter case is undoubtedly the case of a semantic factor such as the degree of semantic (im)personalisation of the sentence in which the periphrasis appears, and the one we use to test the hypothesis about the existence of a common deagentivising factor in the periphrases with haber. Thus, as stated by Stengaard (2003): ‘… by means of the periphrases with aver, the subject of the action expressed by the infinitive either loses its possible role as subject-agent or reinforces its role as subject-receiver or patient involved in the verbal action in question’ (our translation). This effect of meaning has to do with the semantics of the verb haber, which, in contrast to its counterpart tener, would represent a non-agentive or receptive possession where no control would be exerted by the subject over what is possessed (Seifert, 1930). This opposition was explained from a cognitive point of view by Garachana Camarero (1997) in terms of the prototypicality of possession, whereby haber underwent a semantic ‘emptying’ (a figurative control over what is possessed) that tener did not experience. And in another study (Garachana Camarero & Rosenmeyer, 2011), the same author concluded that the agentivity of the subject is greater in constructions with tener que than in those formed with haber de.

To evaluate this idea, we divided the sample into two groups, represented by a) active sentences and b) passive (analytical and reflexive) and impersonal sentences, respectively. If, when considering the verb tense, we spoke of the hyper-representation of the present form over the other forms, in this case the imbalance in the sample is even greater because active sentences account for about 90% in all the groups. Nevertheless, data from the analysis show how the factor is significant in at least two of the dialectal areas (monolingual and Catalan) and with the same distribution in both cases. Hence, we can see how passive and impersonal sentences, where the agent who performs the action is camouflaged, are the ones that most favour haber de, with P values close to unity (.87, 86, respectively). And although, on this occasion, the regression analysis has ruled out the statistical relevance of the factor in the north-western bilingual group, the same distribution can be seen within it, as shown by the frequency analysis (active: 17.7%; passive-impersonal: 75%). ⁵

Something similar was observed in the analysis of a new syntactic factor, namely the distinction between the type of clause where the periphrasis appears, which led us to draw a distinction between subordinate and non-subordinate contexts. It has been said that subordination represents a structural locus that is not very favourable for processes of language change (Matsuda, 1993; Tarallo, 1989), which leads us to wonder about the role it may be playing here. The results of the analysis largely support this hypothesis, as shown by a frequency distribution that follows the same pattern in all cases: subordinate clauses display a greater alliance with the traditional variant, haber de, than non-subordinate clauses. Further still, this distribution is selected as significant by the regression analysis in two of the dialectal areas (Catalan and north-western groups) and, moreover, with practically identical probabilistic values and ranges.

4.7. Extralinguistic factors

On the diachronic axis, the explanatory significance of the differences in the frequencies obtained in the 19th and 20th centuries, which we referred to earlier (see section 4.1), is now confirmed by the multivariate analysis. In the three dialectal areas, as one century gave way to the next, there was a generalised slump both in the realisations of haber de and in the associated probabilistic values. Nevertheless, the magnitude of this factor is greater in the monolingual (range 50) and north-western areas (range 49) than within the Catalan-speaking territories (range 37), which confirms the greater retention of the variant in this dialectal area.

Together with the temporal axis, within this section of extralinguistic factors we also analysed the incidence of different stylistic and social parameters. The former were delimited by using the preliminary combination of two initial parameters, namely: 1) the main subject matter of the texts, a distinction being drawn in this respect between discourses of a more or less intimate nature; and 2) the distance in the relationship between the interlocutors. The result of this combination offers a stylistic continuum on which three points are located, with sufficient distance being left between them to allow a reliable comparison:

This stylistic differentiation is significant in the monolingual areas (range 36), although it is even more so in the Catalan-speaking regions, with an explanatory significance that is twice that of the previous group (range 74). In any event, both cases display an identical distributional profile: the less frequent selection of the haber de variant takes place within the more intimate and personal letters, rather than in the more formal and distant letters and autobiographical texts. The same differences between these latter cases (32.7%) and the intimate letters (16.3%) can be observed, moreover, in the north-western bilingual group, although in this case they are not statistically significant. ⁷

This result is largely consistent with the fate undergone by the periphrasis with haber in contemporary Spanish, in which it has been confined in most cases to formal uses in the written language, in contrast to the more colloquial and everyday nature of tener que. In contrast to the letters with a higher level of spontaneity in their conception and execution, distant or formal letters are characterised by the opposite, and hence their greater association with haber de. And the same can be said of the autobiographical (non-epistolary) texts in which, although they involve subjects that can become quite intimate, the interactivity component that characterises letters is missing. This fact, as well as the possibility that the authors of these texts sight the idea that one day their memories may come to light and be read by other people, would necessarily have an effect on the degree of attention that lies at the base of stylistic differentiation (Labov, 1972).

Of the social factors considered at the outset, two display some degree of statistical significance: socio-cultural level and age. In accordance with the classifications most commonly used in sociolinguistics (Blas Arroyo, 2005; Bergs, 2012; Conde Silvestre, 2007; Tagliamonte, 2012), in this study the social spectrum has been divided up into three groups, which were characterised as low, medium, and high. The significance of this sociolectal differentiation is confirmed by the regression analysis in the two bilingual dialectal groups and, moreover, with a very similar range. Taking into account the fact that the frequency profile is practically identical in the monolingual group, with the lowest strata leading the change towards the use of tener que, and the greater tendency of the higher socio-cultural levels to conserve the variant that had been dominant for centuries (haber de), it seems that we are not only dealing with a factor group with a notable explanatory power, but also have before us a possible change from below.

In addition to the promotion of these new variants by the socially less favoured sectors of society, one of the features characterising these changes from below is the fact they are often taken up and led by the younger generations (Blas Arroyo, 2005; Chambers, 1995; Labov, 2001; Tagliamonte, 2012), something that is also confirmed here. In order to configure this factor, in this study we carried out an emic rather than chronological interpretation (Chambers, 1995), given the difficulties involved in being able to determine the exact age of many of the speakers when they produced their writings. Accordingly, we have resorted to a binary classification, in which the speakers are classified in two groups, depending on what they were experiencing in their lives at the time of writing their texts. To do so, we used both what they said in those texts or the biographical information available from other sources (prologues, biographies, etc.) and—especially in the case of the letters—indirect data related with the actual communicative act itself.

A quantitative analysis of the sample, with its distinct makeup in terms of age differences, revealed an identical pattern in two of the three dialectal areas (this time the exception was in the north-western area, where the differences between the groups are very small). Thus, both in the monolingual regions (34.4%) and in the Catalan-speaking territories (48.7%) older adults display a greater resistance to abandon the use of haber de than the younger speakers (24.2% and 26.5%, respectively). The latter, in contrast, lead the change favouring the alternative variant, tener que. However, the factor is only selected as significant in the Catalan area (range 44), a situation that is undoubtedly affected by the high proportion of uses of haber de among older adults, with figures reaching practically 50% (61) in the period considered in this study. They are even higher in the 19th century (77%), although by no means negligible in the 20th (44%), which places this generational cohort at a notable distance from their counterparts in other Spanish regions.

Finally, the profile of change from below in the Catalan-speaking areas is endorsed by the interaction between the socio-cultural and generational factors. Although the sample differences between some subgroups now make it difficult to establish more accurate inferences, it is nevertheless revealing that, as can be seen in Figure 3, in each and every one of the social sectors it is the young people who are leading the change favouring tener que. It is also interesting to note that this change is especially abrupt in the lower social classes, where no occurrences of the traditional variant haber de are found.

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Figure 3.

Frequency of usage of haber de plus infinitive in the Catalan-speaking areas by generations and cultural levels (%).