Based on a corpus of communicative immediacy texts, the present study analyzes the variation between the adverbs ansí and así during the Golden Age Spanish period. Within the framework of historical sociolinguistics, the mixed-effects logistic regression analysis carried out shows that the vernacular form ansí enjoyed considerable success during this period, although it reached its peak between 1540 and 1620. However, from the latter date onwards, the uses of the adverb declined sharply until the end of the century, foreshadowing the negative attitudes to which ansí was exposed from the 18th century onwards. Another meaningful result of the study is that, in the diffusion of ansí, some extralinguistic factors took on special relevance to a much greater extent than the linguistic ones, an unusual fact among grammatical variables, perhaps explainable in this case by the important morpho-lexical component that this variation represents. The most relevant factors were of a dialectal –the main distribution of the vernacular form took place in the central-southern areas of Spain, as well as in the American speech communities– and sociolectal nature, with a greater preference for ansí among the lower strata, followed by the intermediate ones, and both of them a long way from the social elites. These elites were always more reluctant to use the vernacular form, especially from the middle of the Seventeenth century onwards.
Keywords:
Historical sociolinguistics, Language variation and change, Ansí/así variation, Golden Age, Spanish
Author Biography
José Luis Blas Arroyo, Universitat Jaume I
Para correspondencia, dirigirse a: José Luis Blas Arroyo (blas@fil.uji.es), Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales / Universitat Jaume I; 12071 Avenida Sos Baynat s/n. Castellón (España). ORCID 0000-0002-6700-0668.
Blas Arroyo, J. L. (2021). The rise and fall of ansí in Golden Age Spanish: new data from the perspective of Historical Sociolinguistics. Boletín De Filología, 56(1), pp. 263–299. Retrieved from https://boletinfilologia.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/64211
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