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

María José Serrano is a Full Professor of Linguistics at the Universidad de La Laguna (Spain). Her main areas of expertise include morphosyntactic variation from a discursive-pragmatic and cognitive approach, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Miguel A. Aijón Oliva is a Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the Universidad de Salamanca (Spain). His research activity focuses on variation in grammar from functional and sociopragmatic viewpoints, particularly in mass media and digital environments.

Nikolas Coupland: Foreword – Miguel A. Aijón Oliva/María José Serrano: Introduction: Variation, choice, and the construction of meaning – Antonio Fábregas: Variation, syntax, and semantics: Person features and the non- specific reading of participants – María José Serrano: Variation of the independent infinitive and the desubjectivizing viewpoint of discourse – Miguel A. Aijón Oliva: Defocusing constructions, viewpoint, and reference: The shaping of public institutions vs. citizens in digital opinion pieces – Benjamin Mielenz: Variation in hypothetical conditional structures in the Spanish of Astorga – Dania Ramos Martín: Subject position in Hispanic yes/ no interrogatives: A description according to utterance pragmatic function and geographical variation in a corpus of written speech – Francisco Javier García Yanes: A semantic approach to mood variation: Habitual and factual clauses introduced by después (de) que – Dunia Catalina Méndez Vallejo: Understanding the Focalizing Ser structure: Going beyond syntax.