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

Abstract

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.