¿La reversión de un cambio lingüístico?: Pasado y presente de la variación en las relativas oblicuas de lugar en español

Abstract

The panchronic perspective adopted in this study shows an apparently contradictory outcome in a phenomenon of variation and change that has a long tradition in Spanish. The variationist analysis of several oral corpora representative of current Peninsular Spanish displays an apparent regression of the pronominal forms of the relative in locative sentences (‘la casa en la que vivo' [‘the house in which I live']), in favour of the adverbial ones (‘la casa donde vivo’ [the house where I live]). This result contrasts with a movement in the opposite direction, previously found in the analysis of a historical corpus composed of texts of communicative immediacy, between the sixteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. However, this apparent reversal of the change contrasts with the constraints attested in the internal grammar and the extralinguistic context, which reveal a robust persistence over time, and, in addition, with the same direction of effect. To sum up, mainly due to some irregularities between the corpora analyzed, rather than the reversion of a linguistic change, what the panchronic analysis reveals is a remarkable stability of the variation over more than five centuries of history. This result sheds light on variation not leading to language change, and confirms the need to transcend the most superficial aspects in the study of change.