This article attempts a more complete explanation of the position of verbal agreement affixes which, unlike other inflections, lack a correlation with word order and are prefixes relatively more frequently. An analysis of the factors that determine the position of affixes during morphologization reveals that agreement inflections originate in relatively more mobile sources (unstressed pronouns) and are associated to polymorphemic hosts. This, in combination with a proposed psycholinguistic principle, which during morphologization, prevents fusion of grammatical markers to complex sequences of inflections (for which crosslinguistic statistical evidence is supplied) can be used to explain the position of agreement markers.
This paper aims to test the influence of Catalan-Spanish bilingualism in the variable distribution of the morphological future (MF) cantaré and the periphrastic variant (PF) voy a cantar in Spanish. As Catalan does not have a PF, it has been suggested that in the areas where Spanish coexists with Catalan the MF is relatively more used. A contrastive study of a bilingual community (Palma de Mallorca) and a Spanish monolingual one (Alcalá de Henares) confirms this hypothesis: the frequency of use of the MF among bilinguals is double what it is in a non-contact setting. At the same time, however, the two speech communities yield similar results in regard to the semantic values associated to each of the forms.
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