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C14/18/034#54689580

Abstract:

One of the most distinctive features of the syntax of (pre)classical Spanish is asyndetic complementation (without complementizer que 'that'). While in present-day Spanish asyndetic complement clauses occur almost exclusively with volitional predicates selecting subjunctive mood, as in (1), in the Spanish Golden Age such constructions were extended to more contexts, e.g. non-volitional and indicative-selecting predicates, as in (2): (1) Le rog-óV1 Ø fues-eV2 a Cádiz. DAT.3SG beg-PST.3SG go.SBJV.PST-3SG to Cádiz ‘S/he begged him/her to go to Cádiz’ (RAE 1973:517) (2) Ag-o sab-erV1 a vues-a [merced] Ø me quier-oV2 do-1SG know-INF to your-F.SG [grace] 1SG.REFL want-IND.1SG cas-ar […] marry-INF ‘I let your grace know I want to get married’ (Guadalajara, 1656, CODEA-2347) Previous research considers asyndetic complementation as a stylistic feature of specific registers, either as belonging to formal legal-administrative language (a.o. Girón 2005), or as typical of epistolary texts (Herrero 2005) and of the language of immediacy (Fernández 2009 and Blas & Porcar 2016). Given the lack of agreement on this topic, our quantitative study on historical data attempts to disentangle the style issue by taking a broader look at stylistic variation, focusing not only on document types but also on the social status of the writer relative to the addressee. Given that today the asyndeton is used in formal settings, we started from the hypothesis that it was a formal variant, suitable to address more prestigious people. We analyzed more than 4,000 complement clauses that combine with 12 main predicates, extracted from 1,090 documents produced between the 15th and the 18th century and sourced from the CODEA+2015 corpus (GITHE 2015). We used logistic regression models to evaluate the effect of document types (letters, legal and trade documents, etc.) on the selection of syndetic (with que) vs. asyndetic complement clauses. We also considered the addressee’s social status in comparison to the writer’s as a predictor, as it determines the degree of formality of each document. Our data confirm that asyndetic complementation is favored in documents addressed to a recipient with a higher social status than the writer. The effect of the addressee’s social status may also explain why asyndetic complementation is frequent with verbs of request like suplicar (‘to beg’), whose semantics mitigates the strength of a directive speech act (cf. Iglesias Recuero 2016), whereas it is less frequent with semantically related verbs with a stronger imposition meaning, like ordenar or mandar (‘to order’). This observation suggests that the syndetic vs. asyndetic alternation is not strictly determined by the matrix verb semantics nor by the document type, but rather by the degree of power or solidarity between writer and addressee (Brown & Gilman 1960). Our contribution shows that a study about the stylistic variation of syntactic variants should not be limited to document types, but must also consider the degree of social power and solidarity between writer and addressee and, in a next step, degrees of politeness. Thus, our account of different complementation types and their correlation with directive speech acts invites to combine historical sociolinguistics with historical pragmatics. References Brown, Roger and Gilman, Albert (1960), The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity. In Sebeok, T. A. (ed.), (1960), Style in Language, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 253-76. Blas Arroyo, José Luis, & Porcar Miralles, Margarita (2016), Un marcador sociolingüístico en la sintaxis del Siglo de Oro: Patrones de variación y cambio lingüístico en completivas dependientes de predicados doxásticos. Revista internacional de lingüística iberoamericana, 28, 157–185. 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Iglesias Recuero, Silvia (2016), Otra cara de la pragmática histórica: la historia de los actos de habla en español: peticiones y órdenes en las “novelas ejemplares” de Miguel de Cervantes, in Araceli López Serena, Antonio Narbona Jiménez, Santiago del Rey Quesada & Rafael Cano Aguilar (eds.), (2016), El español a través del tiempo: estudios ofrecidos a Rafael Cano Aguilar, (Colección lingüística 50), Sevilla: Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, vol. 2, 971–994. Real Academia Española (1973), Esbozo de una nueva gramática de la lengua española, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.