Ojalá tener todos los datos: the origin of a syntactic innovation in Spanish

This monographic habilitation thesis explores the most initial phase of a very recent syntactic change in Spanish, namely, the possibility that ojalá legitimates non-finite predications, including infinitive, gerund and non-verbal clauses. Ojalá, although best classified as an adverb, has verbal-like properties that stem from its etymological origin (the Hispanic Arabic conditional sentence law šá lláh ‘if God wishes’), the most relevant of which being the possibility of legitimating subjunctive clauses with or without the complementiser que. The innovative patterns have not been studied in detail before, but there is some consensus that they are typical from social media. I explore this hypothesis by focussing on the social network with the largest diffusion potential, for having the broadest network of public users, that is, Twitter. By looking at both reference corpora from the 20th and 21st century and an exhaustive collection of tweets with the word ojalá posted in the first years of this social network (2006-2010) as well as a collection of full timelines, I detect a number of semantic and syntactic innovations that ojalá has undergone in recent times in different Spanish-speaking countries, all of which share the possibility that ojalá legitimates infinitive clauses and non-verbal predications. By looking at different dimensions (grammatical behaviour, geography, time, social prevalence and individual development), I identify three different situations: 1) Chilean and Colombian Spanish, where ojalá has undergone a semantic extension (conveying wishes > ‘ideally’), resulting on a higher frequency of ojalá before infinitives and non-verbal phrases that are syntactically legitimated by an external (i.e., higher-level) element. In these varieties, the use of ojalá to legitimate non-finite clauses is virtually restricted to infinitive clauses and seems to be incipient in the early 21st century, but it is not a social network innovation. 2) In Dominican Spanish ojalá has reinforced its verbal properties, developing a semantic subject (the experiencer of the wish conveyed by ojalá, which in other varieties is exclusively interpreted as the speaker). Legitimation of infinitive and non-verbal clauses by ojalá is widespread in this variety and is most likely previous to the existence of Twitter, although reference corpora do not attest it (suggesting that it is a rather colloquial use). 3) European Spanish is the variety in which ojalá can legitimate all non-finite predications, namely, infinitive, gerund and non-verbal clauses. Despite this, these innovations are more recent in this variety and the data is consistent with them being a social network linguistic innovation. This thesis aims at contributing to three different areas of linguistic research. First, Spanish linguistics, as it gives a detailed description of the innovative behaviour of ojalá in Spanish. Second, Historical linguistics, as it provides a microdiachronic study of a the initial phase of a colloquial syntactic innovation diffused among adult speakers, that is, a situation that can rarely be accessed with the historical data we have (since the initial phase of a change is typically hard to access with historical documentation, even more in the case of colloquial changes) and which has independent theoretical value (because adult speakers are said to display conservative linguistic behaviour and not to be good candidates for being the locus of innovations). Last, the study aims to offer a methodological contribution to linguistic studies carried on with social network big data, highlighting the importance of combining computational techniques with a philological approach.