Factores externos y cambio lingüístico: la pérdida de la distinción genérica en los posesivos del español antiguo

This article claims for the need of considering external factors in order to attain an explanation about the loss of the gender distinctions in the history of possessives in Old Spanish (mio, to, so - mi, tu, su). None of the internal factors proposed so far in the literature, even when influencing the evolution of possessives, fully explains this change. The hypotheses presented so far (namely, Méndez 1988, Lyons 1993 and Espinosa 2002) are reviewed. The data, obtained from a corpus of 13th century non literary documents (CODEA) and indirectly supported by observations about current dialectal varieties, allow to define the geographical areas where SU and SO paradigms prevail. We conclude that the SU variants come from Eastern and spread because of the prestige assigned to them, as their frequency in high registers show. In this way, the hypothesis defended by Espinosa (2002) is empirically proved.