La distribución de las variantes -mente, -miente y -mientre en el CODEA (1221-1420): espacio variacional y cambio lingüístico

Diachronic interest in adverbial formations with -mente has increased in recent years, especially, as far as the evolution of its main variants (-mente, -miente, -m(i)entre) is concerned. The historical evolution of these variants is of great value to the periodization of Spanish, the dating of textual copies and the theory of language change. The present article examines about a thousand adverbs with -mente taken from the Corpus de Documentos Anteriores a 1700 (CODEA) between 1221 and 1420; this corpus encompasses accurately dated documents and permits the geographical localization and socio-stylistic characterization of each variant. This article mainly attempts to set the following methodological principle as a basic praxis in research on historical linguistics: variants at stake in a process of language change must be allocated throughout the variational spectrum before any functional explanation is formulated. Additionally, it provides empirical support for recent studies and solves many of the questions recent literature leaves open about these adverbial allomorphs.