«Sin otro pleto e sin otro enxeco»: Lexical Structures and Variation in early Northern Castilian Documentation

Abstract

Despite the fact that they respond to the need for semantic precision typical of this discursive tradition and despite their relatively fixed and repetitive nature, the typical structures of notarial documentation in which part of its lexicon is organised -series, doublets, binomials or complex lexical units- are useful for discerning the variation, whether stylistic, chronological or geographical, as we will try to show on the basis of the North Castilian documentation of the CORHEN corpus. Thus, the vocabulary included in these structures may reflect diatopic variation or scriptural preferences, as is the case with corte, or to show procedures of lexicosemantic variation and change, such as the process of specialisation along the 13th century of the polysemic word pleito from ‘acuerdo’ to ‘litigio’, while it prevails over semantic parallels such as enjeco.