Text Types and the Shaping of Language Change in the History of Spanish: The Diffusion and Conditioning of Two Syntactic Changes

This article examines the role of text types in the diffusion and conditioning of two syntactic changes in the history of Spanish from a comparative variationist perspective. It focuses, first, on the spread of prepositional variants in finite complement clauses dependent on nouns and adjectives in the seventeenth century and, second, on article insertion in oblique relative clauses in the eighteenth century. The analysis draws on corpora representing discourse traditions located at opposite ends of the conceptual continuum between communicative immediacy and distance: ego-documents, literary texts, and legal-administrative documents. Using mixed-effects logistic regression models, the study compares both the frequency of the innovative variants and the linguistic and extralinguistic factors that constrain their selection in each textual domain. The results show that the two changes display different evolutionary profiles. In the first variable, the diffusion and conditioning of the innovative variants are largely similar at both ends of the conceptual axis, which points to convergent trajectories. In the second, by contrast, the spread of the article-bearing variant is more advanced in texts closer to communicative immediacy and shows important differences in conditioning when compared with texts associated with communicative distance. These contrasts appear to be linked both to the different socio-stylistic profiles of the two processes—change from above versus change from below—and to the distinct evolutionary stages they reflect. These findings show that the explanatory weight of text type is not uniform across processes of language change, but varies according to the socio-stylistic profile of the innovation and the developmental stage it has reached. The comparison thus refines the established view of discourse traditions as a relevant dimension of historical change by showing that their effects may range from substantial convergence to clearly differentiated patterns of diffusion and conditioning.