Epistemicity in voseo and tuteo negative commands in Argentinian Spanish

•Perception experiment investigating two negative commands in Argentinian Spanish.•Employs variationist methods of analysis for pragmatic analysis.•Shows that negative commands are able to convey epistemic certainty.•Voseo negative command conveys significantly more epistemic certainty than tuteo.•Study of morphosyntactic variation should consider pragmatic factors first.

The present study explores epistemic meaning in the alternation between two negative commands in Argentinian Spanish (AS). A perception experiment was done with 112 native speaker participants. All participants were presented with 28 brief contexts followed by an utterance that included either a voseo negative command, a tuteo negative command, a polar question or a declarative. Participants were tasked with using a 5-point Likert scale to make judgments about how certain the speaker was that the addressee would have performed the action in the utterance. Both pragmatic and social factors were considered in the analysis of the data. Results indicate that native speakers of AS identify the voseo form as conveying significantly more epistemic certainty than the tuteo form (p < .001). No social factors influenced the perception of certainty, providing insight to social differences previously found in production studies ( Johnson and Grinstead, 2011 and Johnson, in press). The study supports prior research demonstrating that commands express propositional content. It also reveals strong evidence that epistemic bias toward one state of affairs governs the morphological variation between two negative command forms in AS.