Syllabic and asyllabic pronoun variants in the Spanish of Alfonso X: apocope, elision or epenthesis?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54166/rhle.2018.13.03Keywords:
Clitic pronoun, Apocope, Epenthesis, Medieval SpanishAbstract
The present study investigates the factors controlling the distribution of syllabic and asyllabic clitic pronoun variants in three medieval Spanish texts. Previous studies disagree on the question whether vowel elision affects only <e> (me> m, le> I etc.) or also <o> (lo > I), and they observe considerable vacillation between realisation and elision of the vowel. The present analysis proves that vowel omission affects exclusively <e>, i.e. the forms me, te, le, se. Furthermore, the appearance of the asyllabic form requires that the pronoun build a graphic unit with another word, and that there be an immediately adjacent vowel within this unit. Under these conditions, me, te, le and m, t, l are in strictly complementary distribution. Se features a special form sse which alternates with the asyllabic variant s after verbs ending in a vowel. As /e/ acts as the epenthetic default vowel since proto-romance times, it seems plausible to analyse the oscillation in the clitic pronouns as epenthesis instead of elision. Under this view, it cannot be unified with the process of apocope observed in major lexical categories during that period. The decline of the asyllabic forms parallels the decreasing tendency to integrate function words into graphic units with neighbouring words. Prosody loses its influence on the graphic representations, which fosters the consolidation of the syllabic clitic forms me, te, le, se till modern Spanish.
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