Spanish heritage speakers in the Southwest: Factors contributing to the maintenance of the subjunctive in concessive clauses

Several studies have looked into the different uses of indicative and subjunctive in the Spanish of heritage speakers. Generally speaking, research seems to show that mood simplification is taking place in heritage speakers’ Spanish. Mood and modal alternation is of particular interest to research on language change and contact due to the wide variation in the ability of heritage speakers to produce and apply it. (This is, in part, no doubt, due to their embodiment of a complex relationship between syntactic form, semantics and pragmatic meaning.) The present study examines the use of the indicative/subjunctive in the written and oral Spanish production of one group of heritage language speakers to find out which similarities/differences can be found when compared to monolingual speakers and what this says about how their linguistic systems are configurated.