Tipos textuales y cambio lingüístico: las formas verbales subjuntivas en -ra en el español peninsular de los siglos XVIII y XIX

Abstract

In Contemporary Spanish varieties, the alternation of subjunctive verb forms in -ra and -se is unequal and there is a strong preference of use of the former. The focus of the paper is to analyze the progress of -ra and the decadence of -se in the European Spanish of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Based on data extracted from the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE), the Corpus Hispánico y Americano en la Red: Textos Antiguos (CHARTA), the Oralia diacrónica del español (ODE), the Corpus de Documentos Españoles Anteriores a 1900 (CODEA+2022), and the Portal de Archivos de Españoles (PARES), we analyzed the -ra and -se frequencies in relation with linguistic variables (value, clause, subject and lexical frequency) and extralinguistic variables (period and text type) using descriptive and inferential statistics. Results show an evident spread of -ra during XIX century, especially in documents that represent oral communicative situations, such as legal and private documents, which is linked to the current perception of -se as a formal variant in Contemporary Spanish (Moreno Fernández, 2016; NGLE, 2009, 457).