Los límites de la variación : adverbios y pronombres en subordinadas de relativo del siglo XVI. Sociolingüística histórica a partir de un corpus de inmediatez comunicativa

The variation between adverbial (donde ‘where’) and pronominal forms (en (el) que-cual ‘in which’) in prepositional relative clauses in the Spanish of the sixteenth century is analyzed under the variationism paradigm, as an example of the need to specify in detail the exact envelope of variation in which this variation really takes place. Thus, excluding from the study several contexts in which one of the variants hardly occurs, our results provide a different picture compared to some previous studies. Therefore, we have seen how, at least in the first period of Golden Age Spanish, the use of donde in locative prepositional relatives is prevalent and with a clear upward trend as the century progresses. To these results may have contributed the type of corpus analyzed, consisting of ego-documents (mainly private letters), close to the pole of communicative immediacy, written by 867 Spaniards from different social and dialectal backgrounds. The logistic regression analysis undertaken (Rbrul) shows a predominance of linguistic factors in explaining variation, especially those related to the syntax and semantics of the antecedent, either independently or in interaction. The extra-linguistic factors are less explanatory, so neither gender nor the immigration context offer significant differences between the respective groups, although some sampling irregularities in the case of gender may have introduced some bias in the data. Nevertheless, this is not the case of social status and tenor, whose interaction yields significant results. However, these are limited to the first half of the century, not the second one, when the differences between groups practically disappear. These results suggest that social elites could have ended up assimilating an old change from below, originally characteristic of more informal styles and probably started in popular sectors.