The limits of variation: adverbs and pronouns in relative clauses in the 16th century. Historical sociolinguistics based on a corpus of communicative immediacy

Abstract

The alternation between the adverbial (donde) and pronominal (en que-cual) forms of the relative in subordinate locatives of the 16th century is analyzed in these pages as an example of the need to specify in detail the variable context (envelope of variation) in which any phenomenon of variation takes place. Thus excluded from the study various contexts in which the latter hardly occurs (or does not occur at all), our results offer a different picture from that offered by some previous works. In this way, we have been able to verify how, at least in the first classical Spanish, the use of the adverb in relative locatives with antecedent is clearly in the majority over the pronoun que, and, furthermore, with a clear upward trend as the century progresses.
As in other studies where textual traditions have been seen as potentially determinant in the outcomes of the variation, the type of corpus analysed, composed of texts close to the pole of communicative immediacy, mostly, may have contributed to these results. of an epistolary nature and written by 867 Spaniards of different social and dialectal status.
From the logistic regression analysis undertaken (Rbrul), a preeminence of linguistic factors is derived to explain the variation, especially those related to the syntax and semantics of the antecedent, either in isolation or in interaction. The extra-linguistic factors are less explanatory, in such a way that neither sex nor the migratory context offer hardly any differences between the corresponding groups, although various sample irregularities (for example, scarce female presence) may have introduced some bias in the data. The case of social status and the tenor of epistolary interactions is different, the combination of which yields significant results. However, these are limited to the first half of the century, but not to the second, when the differences between some groups and others are practically neutralized. These results suggest that the privileged classes could have ended up assuming an old change from below, characteristic of the most informal styles and probably started in the popular sectors.