The Spanish system of address pronouns suffered a dramatic increase in complexity between the 15th and 17th centuries. This study aims to explain how and why this change (or set of changes) took place when and where it did by using the model of koineization as a heuristic device. It argues that sociocultural factors (particularly widespread social status anxiety) and the salience of address forms played a primary role in driving the changes forward. It also argues, however, that sociodemographic factors associated with koineization (demographic movement and dialect mixing) contributed significantly to the timing, rapidity, location, and specific outcomes, including the grammaticalization of vuestra merced to usted and numerous other reduced forms.
The infinitives of several Romance languages can appear with an overt subject. Languages such as Portuguese and Galician feature inflectional morphology on infinitives with overt subjects – the commonly named personal infinitives, such as (nós) dizermos ‘us to speak’. Other languages, such as Castilian1 and Asturian, feature overt subjects alongside infinitives with no corresponding agreement morphology on the verb – a structure I call the personalized infinitive, such as nosotros decir ~ decir nosotros ‘us to speak’. Though superficially similar in use, personal and personalized infinitives differ among Ibero-Romance languages in their history and their uses in the modern dialects. In this paper I distinguish both structures, illustrating the morphosyntactic differences between the two. I also argue for the influence of koineization and language contact as impetus for the historical development of these forms in the various languages.
Spanish exhibits two markers to convey a progressive meaning: the Simple Present and the Present Progressive. The use of these markers is contextually biased: the Simple Present requires contexts where speaker and addressee share perceptual access to the situation at issue, while the Present Progressive does not require such support. We test this generalization through real-time comprehension: the Simple Present marker in contexts without shared perceptual access should elicit slower reading times than within shared perceptual access contexts. A self-paced reading study (n = 176) in three different varieties of Spanish (Mexican, Rioplatense, and Castilian) bears this prediction out. Additionally, we find that the Mexican variety appears further advanced in the Progressive-to-Imperfective diachronic shift than its dialectal counterparts.
Grammatical restructuring in contact situations is customarily analyzed under the lens of either language contact or dialect contact. In this study we argue that both processes may operate jointly in social settings where dialectal accommodation and adult L2 learning favor the same linguistic outcomes. From an evolutionary perspective, this overlap between both forms of contact may be conceptualized as a function of a common underlying process, with speakers selecting features of heterogeneous provenance, acquired at various life stages. We exemplify this joint effect by focusing on two changes in the history of Spanish: the rearrangement of the 3rd person object clitic system in medieval southern Iberian Castilian and the merging of the medieval sibilants in early colonial Spanish.
Among the surviving Afro-Hispanic linguistic manifestations, one of the most difficult to trace historically is the speech of the Congos of Panama’s Caribbean coast, who maintain a series of folkloric manifestations occurring during Carnival season that includes a special language. According to oral tradition, Congo speech was devised among captive and maroon Africans in colonial Panama as a means of hiding their speech from their colonial masters. Putting together the contemporary variation in Congo speech and what diachronic developments can be extrapolated, a complex picture emerges that cannot be easily resolved with the notion that this dialect developed exclusively as a cryptolect in contact with Spanish colonists. The present study offers a plausible scenario, based on synchronic variation and available historical documentation.
This paper casts light on the socio-historical background of two Afro-Andean vernaculars: Yungueño Spanish (Bolivia) and Choteño Spanish (Ecuador). Contrary to what has been suggested in the literature (Lipski 2008; Perez 2015; Schwegler 1999, 2014), results indicate that a concomitance of sociodemographic factors significantly reduced the possibility of Spanish creoles forming in the colonial Andes. For this reason, this study provides new data that contribute to the long-lasting debate on the evolution of the Afro-Hispanic varieties of the Americas (McWhorter 2000; Lipski 2005; Sessarego 2019a). In particular, the evidence here reported appears to cast serious doubts on proposals suggesting that these and other Afro-Hispanic varieties may be conceived of as the result of a previous (de)creolization phase (Granda 1968 et seq.).
This study analyzes historical and contemporary data of Spanish produced by Catalan-dominant bilinguals in Majorca to explore the origin and historical evolution of a contact feature of Majorcan Spanish: the preposition en to express direction of movement. The transgenerational survival of this feature of Majorcan Spanish for over three centuries points to a scenario of intra-community recycling of a structure that emerged as the result of incomplete grammatical competence in Spanish and was then perpetuated by limited contact with monolingual Spanish speakers. The changing linguistic ecology of Majorca, however, with wider access to canonical varieties of Spanish in the last half century, has facilitated the demise of this trait among younger urban generations.
Until the early 19th century, the letter 〈x〉 was a common representation of the voiceless velar fricative /x/ (Quixote, brúxula). Despite the Royal Spanish Academy’s (RAE) 1815 elimination of 〈x〉 for /x/, it has survived in a number of Mexican indigenous toponyms and their derivatives as well as in a handful of Spanish anthroponymic variants. Drawing on diatopic, diachronic demographic data, this paper traces the retention of vestigial 〈x〉 in six anthroponymic variants: the given name Ximena and the surnames Ximénez/Ximenes, Mexía/s, and Roxas. These forms can be attributed to the often exceptional orthography of proper nouns from a normative perspective. In the case of Ximena, a powerful resurgence of the feature is linked to robust indexicalities of 〈x〉 in Mexican society.
The Spanish system of address pronouns suffered a dramatic increase in complexity between the 15th and 17th centuries. This study aims to explain how and why this change (or set of changes) took place when and where it did by using the model of koineization as a heuristic device. It argues that sociocultural factors (particularly widespread social status anxiety) and the salience of address forms played a primary role in driving the changes forward. It also argues, however, that sociodemographic factors associated with koineization (demographic movement and dialect mixing) contributed significantly to the timing, rapidity, location, and specific outcomes, including the grammaticalization of vuestra merced to usted and numerous other reduced forms.
The infinitives of several Romance languages can appear with an overt subject. Languages such as Portuguese and Galician feature inflectional morphology on infinitives with overt subjects – the commonly named personal infinitives, such as (nós) dizermos ‘us to speak’. Other languages, such as Castilian1 and Asturian, feature overt subjects alongside infinitives with no corresponding agreement morphology on the verb – a structure I call the personalized infinitive, such as nosotros decir ~ decir nosotros ‘us to speak’. Though superficially similar in use, personal and personalized infinitives differ among Ibero-Romance languages in their history and their uses in the modern dialects. In this paper I distinguish both structures, illustrating the morphosyntactic differences between the two. I also argue for the influence of koineization and language contact as impetus for the historical development of these forms in the various languages.
Spanish exhibits two markers to convey a progressive meaning: the Simple Present and the Present Progressive. The use of these markers is contextually biased: the Simple Present requires contexts where speaker and addressee share perceptual access to the situation at issue, while the Present Progressive does not require such support. We test this generalization through real-time comprehension: the Simple Present marker in contexts without shared perceptual access should elicit slower reading times than within shared perceptual access contexts. A self-paced reading study (n = 176) in three different varieties of Spanish (Mexican, Rioplatense, and Castilian) bears this prediction out. Additionally, we find that the Mexican variety appears further advanced in the Progressive-to-Imperfective diachronic shift than its dialectal counterparts.
Grammatical restructuring in contact situations is customarily analyzed under the lens of either language contact or dialect contact. In this study we argue that both processes may operate jointly in social settings where dialectal accommodation and adult L2 learning favor the same linguistic outcomes. From an evolutionary perspective, this overlap between both forms of contact may be conceptualized as a function of a common underlying process, with speakers selecting features of heterogeneous provenance, acquired at various life stages. We exemplify this joint effect by focusing on two changes in the history of Spanish: the rearrangement of the 3rd person object clitic system in medieval southern Iberian Castilian and the merging of the medieval sibilants in early colonial Spanish.
Among the surviving Afro-Hispanic linguistic manifestations, one of the most difficult to trace historically is the speech of the Congos of Panama’s Caribbean coast, who maintain a series of folkloric manifestations occurring during Carnival season that includes a special language. According to oral tradition, Congo speech was devised among captive and maroon Africans in colonial Panama as a means of hiding their speech from their colonial masters. Putting together the contemporary variation in Congo speech and what diachronic developments can be extrapolated, a complex picture emerges that cannot be easily resolved with the notion that this dialect developed exclusively as a cryptolect in contact with Spanish colonists. The present study offers a plausible scenario, based on synchronic variation and available historical documentation.
This paper casts light on the socio-historical background of two Afro-Andean vernaculars: Yungueño Spanish (Bolivia) and Choteño Spanish (Ecuador). Contrary to what has been suggested in the literature (Lipski 2008; Perez 2015; Schwegler 1999, 2014), results indicate that a concomitance of sociodemographic factors significantly reduced the possibility of Spanish creoles forming in the colonial Andes. For this reason, this study provides new data that contribute to the long-lasting debate on the evolution of the Afro-Hispanic varieties of the Americas (McWhorter 2000; Lipski 2005; Sessarego 2019a). In particular, the evidence here reported appears to cast serious doubts on proposals suggesting that these and other Afro-Hispanic varieties may be conceived of as the result of a previous (de)creolization phase (Granda 1968 et seq.).
This study analyzes historical and contemporary data of Spanish produced by Catalan-dominant bilinguals in Majorca to explore the origin and historical evolution of a contact feature of Majorcan Spanish: the preposition en to express direction of movement. The transgenerational survival of this feature of Majorcan Spanish for over three centuries points to a scenario of intra-community recycling of a structure that emerged as the result of incomplete grammatical competence in Spanish and was then perpetuated by limited contact with monolingual Spanish speakers. The changing linguistic ecology of Majorca, however, with wider access to canonical varieties of Spanish in the last half century, has facilitated the demise of this trait among younger urban generations.
Until the early 19th century, the letter 〈x〉 was a common representation of the voiceless velar fricative /x/ (Quixote, brúxula). Despite the Royal Spanish Academy’s (RAE) 1815 elimination of 〈x〉 for /x/, it has survived in a number of Mexican indigenous toponyms and their derivatives as well as in a handful of Spanish anthroponymic variants. Drawing on diatopic, diachronic demographic data, this paper traces the retention of vestigial 〈x〉 in six anthroponymic variants: the given name Ximena and the surnames Ximénez/Ximenes, Mexía/s, and Roxas. These forms can be attributed to the often exceptional orthography of proper nouns from a normative perspective. In the case of Ximena, a powerful resurgence of the feature is linked to robust indexicalities of 〈x〉 in Mexican society.