Discursive variation and language change: the diffusion of prepositional variants in 17th-century completive subordinate clauses at two extremes of communicative distance

Abstract

Within the framework of diachronic variationism, in this paper, we analyse the incidence of the discursive-textual component in the social diffusion and in the internal and external conditioning of a linguistic change that had a particular incidence in the 17th century: the substitution of traditional queístic variants by prepositional alternatives in completive subordinates dependent on nominal categories. For this purpose, we perform a comparative analysis of the results obtained in two independent mixed-effects logistic regression analyses on two corpora located at the two extremes of the axis of communicative distance: private correspondence (immediacy pole) and literary texts (distance pole). The results of this comparison show that with minor variations –for the justification of which sampling differences between one corpus and the other cannot be ruled out– the extent of the phenomenon and the conditioning mentioned above are similar. It would show that the phenomenon was configured at the time as a linguistic change from above, at the behest of the elites, which, however, soon found a place in other genres, including those of communicative immediacy.