Hacia un “mapa variacional” de documentos no literarios de los Siglos de Oro (1581–1620)

Recent work on the diachronic development of the Spanish language has stressed the need to delineate a multidimensional history, based on a representative and comparable corpus, which would give a full account of the Spanish standard configuration. Especially during the Golden Age period, standardization is carried out through a selection process. Few studies, however, have fully examined the stylistic and social status of the variants at stake. The present study relates six linguistic variables (future forms, prepositional government of deber + INF, the future subjunctive, preposition selection in temporal adjuncts, modal changes of -ra and the position of clitics) with social and stylistic dimensions. With data taken from the Corpus de Documentos Españoles Anteriores a 1700 (CODEA), these case studies allow to outline a “variational map” that would explain the conscious choices of speakers in a context of variation and change.