Estudio diacrónico del dequeísmo en un corpus de cartas privadas

Abstract

Despite the considerable attention that dequeísmo has attracted within Hispanic linguistics research,  in fact, there are only a few studies approaching this construction from a diachronic perspective. Also, dequeísmo is rarely documented in the historical reference corpora of Spanish, thus limiting the empirical support for the diachronic approach of this construction. This paper provides new evidence and new examples of dequeísmo in classical and modern Spanish drawn from Post Scriptum, a corpus of private letters written between the 16th century and the first third of the 19th century. Based on the data and properties of this corpus, we address four topics concerning dequeísmo in the past: (i) its status as a marginal phenomenon, belonging to colloquial language (ii) its connection with the increasing use of the sequence de que in complement clauses (iii) its change into a visible variant throughout the Early Modern Spanish, and (iv) its distribution and how it matches the geographical distribution of speakers. Finally, in more general terms, this paper draws attention to the importance that small specialised corpora can have within historical linguistics research.