Sociodialectología histórica de las desinencias de 2ª persona plural en el español peninsular europeo. Transmisión, difusión y divergencia dialectal

Unlike previous studies on the historical development of Spanish second person plural endings, the present research deals with the intermediate stages of that change and focuses on the extension of the inflectional diphthongs to the unstressed and -stes endings during the 16th and 17th centuries in European Spanish. Scholars have paid no attention to the dialectal distribution of the variants at stake. The interplay between socio-stylistic factors and historical and modern dialectal data provides some insights into the genesis, development and diffusion of standard and non-standard suffixes. The sample of over 2300 tokens has been extracted from two non-literary corpus reflecting everyday language use. The paper concludes that, once standardized, the innovative endings spread hierarchically as urban forms and lead to divergence from neighbouring rural dialects. Such pattern of diffusion requires a complex interpretative model in combination with the notion of transmission.