Sociolinguistic aspects of a grammatical change: the expression of future

Abstract

In our research, we have analysed the social and linguistic insertion of a change taking place in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Canary Islands): the advance of the use of the future form –ré (Mañana iré a la playa "Tomorrow I’ll go to the beach") against other forms of the present (Mañana voy a la playa "Tomorrow I’m going to go to the beach"), wich had been more common in the city in former decades, and of periphrasis (Mañana voy a ir a la playa "Tomorrow I’m going to go to the beach"). The three expressions of future time do not represent, however, different ways of saying the same thing (in the Labovian sense), but rather a different means (in the pragmatic sense) of locating future facts.