Towards a grammatical dialectology of medieval Spanish: issues about the morphology of the imperfect and future subjunctive

Abstract

This paper attempts to show how the application of the method in which historical dialectology is based on, beyond its original limits—the twelfth century and the phonetic level—, demonstrates the continuity of intradialect variety of the language in Castile and redraws its interdialect borders. In particular, we have studied the morphological variation of the future subjunctive verb tense in the thirteenth century through the Corpus Histórico del Español Norteño (CORHEN); focusing on two documentary focal points, San Salvador de Oña (representing the Northern Castilian) and Las Huelgas de Burgos (central Castilian), we have established a contrastive analysis between them both and also with the continuum of linguistic varieties from the Western (León) - Eastern (Aragón) axis. The results reveal a Northern Castilian variety differentiated from that in the central area of Burgos due to presenting Western imprint options and, especially, Eastern, as much as to gathering variants described as general in Medieval Castilian.