Morphosyntactic variation in dialects of Spanish: an analysis from the diacronia

In this research, we analyze some Spanish grammatical phenomena which, according to the Nueva Gramatica de la Lengua Espanola of Real Academia Espanola (2009), are characteristic of some of its dialects. For instance, the adjectivation of adverbs such as medio and bastante, the combination of un otro, the si propio 'si mismo' construction, the placement of unstressed personal pronouns, the pronominal use of recordar, and the expression cada que 'siempre que'. Taking their presence in two corpus (CORDE and CORPES XXI) and the fact that dialectology studies, grammars or linguistic atlas barely pay attention to morphosyntactic variation, this study demonstrates that such grammatical structures are to be considered the result of linguistic change as they do appear in earlier stages of Spanish, with more or less vitality according to period and text typology. Thus, this paper shows that diachronic analyses can provide valuable information on the issue of Spanish dialectal morphosyntactic variation.