Auge y caida de una forma obsolescente: la evolucion del relativo quien con antecedente plural en la historia del espanol

Through the sociolinguistic analysis of texts close to the pole of communicative immediacy, in this paper we analyze a phenomenon of variation and change extended throughout almost five centuries in the history of Spanish: the alternation between the relative pronouns quien and quienes with plural antecedent. Putting the focus on quien, currently a moribund form, the study analyzes the linguistic and extralinguistic factors, as well as the normative prescriptions that have conditioned this variation in different periods. In this evolution, five different phases are detected in which several structural factor groups constrain the variation, even though its strength weakens as time passes. Among these stands out the type of relative, with the restrictive clauses as the main allies of quien, and to a lesser extent others, such as the syntactic and semantic nature of the antecedents. On the social level, and along with some suggestive dialectal implications, what stands out is the status of writers. However, this factor shows different explanatory directions at different times, in parallel to changes in the prestige of pronouns in the temporal axis. Finally, the article concludes with some theoretical implications about this and other obsolescent forms in the history of Spanish.