Abstract

One of the features with which the Spanish of America has been characterized, in general, and the Antillean and Cuban, in particular, has been the distinction of case in the use of non-reflexive third-person unstressed pronouns (lo, la, le and their plurals). In this research, a sample of personal letters from 19th century Cuban men and women is presented to account for the pattern followed in their employment. In addition to the expurgation of the forms in their contexts and the frequency analysis, we attend to variables that can condition one or another behavior, proposed in previous research, such as the semantic-referential qualities of the pronominalized object and discursive pragmatic factors.


The analyses allow to reach conclusions about the regular behaviors in the sample and its relationship with the variables considered, with which valid hypotheses are proposed for the characterization of nineteenth-century Cuban Spanish and the results obtained can be compared with those found in other investigations, times or zones.