Same people, different outcomes: the sociolinguistic profile of three language changes in the history of Spanish. A corpus-based approach

José Luis Blas Arroyo

doi:10.1515/jhsl-2021-0025

Article

Same people, different outcomes: the sociolinguistic profile of three language changes in the history of Spanish. A corpus-based approach

José Luis Blas Arroyo

Published/Copyright: May 5, 2023

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From the journal Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics Volume 9 Issue 1

Abstract

Within the framework of Historical Sociolinguistics and using a corpus of ego-documents written by Spaniards from different social backgrounds, this study analyses the sociolinguistic profiles of three phenomena of variation and change that took place in two critical periods in the history of Spanish: the Golden Age and the Early Modern Spanish. The study focuses on three standard variants that would end up displacing several vernacular forms whose use was much more widespread in Golden Age Spanish: (a) the use of the complementiser que in doxastic predicates depending on the verb creer [’believe, think’], to the detriment of the variant creer + Ø; (b) the analogical pronoun quienes in relative clauses with an explicit human antecedent (’estos son los niños a quienes me dirigí’ [‘these are the children I spoke to’]), as opposed to the traditional relative quien; (c) the diffusion of the demonstrative pronoun allí [‘there’] at the expense of allá. Despite the success of the standard variants in the eighteenth century, the three cases of variation show different sociolinguistic conditioning, which in turn is closely related to several parameters, such as the speed and robustness of the respective changes, the typology of the variables and the linguistic constraints at work in each case.

Keywords: corpus linguistics; egodocuments; historical sociolinguistics; language variation and change; old Spanish

Corresponding author: José Luis Blas Arroyo, Universitat Jaume I, Castelló de la Plana, Spain, E-mail: blas@fil.uji.es

Funding source: Ministerio de Ciencia e InnovaciÃ³n

Award Identifier / Grant number: PID2021-122597NB-I00

Acknowledgements

The Author would like to thank Brittani Cortés and Miriam Salvador for their collaboration in the Sociolinguistic Lab on various tasks related to the project. Author would also like to thank two anonymous referees and the editors for their insightful and constructive comments. Any remaining errors are my sole responsibility.

Research funding: The present study is part of the research project “Socio-stylistic, idiolectal and discursive factors in Spanish variation and change: contributions from Historical sociolinguistics”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and ERDF funds (Ref. PID2021-122597NB-I00).

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Received: 2021-11-12

Accepted: 2022-08-31

Published Online: 2023-05-05

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2021-0025

Keywords for this article

corpus linguistics; egodocuments; historical sociolinguistics; language variation and change; old Spanish