Tense and Mood of -ra Forms in a Corpus of Women’s Letters (1547–1561)

Abstract

This article analyzes the -ra forms in a corpus of 195 letters written by noblewomen between 1547 and 1561 at the court of Emperor Charles V. From a linguistic perspective, cantara undergoes a process of “functional renewal” (Rosemeyer, 2021) that began in the 15th century and was consolidated—though not definitively—in the 16th century. The data from the corpus show that -ra forms had become established in the domain of the irrealis by the mid-16th century within a medium discursive tradition (Octavio de Toledo, 2020), such as courtly letters, in which, however, indicative and subjunctive values coexist; and, likewiese, from a temporal perspective, both simple and compound pre-past tenses, as well as co-past tenses.