Escritura, oralidad y variación: Nuevos datos sobre la alternancia allí/allá a la luz de un corpus epistolar del siglo XVI

This corpus-based research uses a set of 895 private letters written by almost seven hundred different individuals to analyse the variation between the Spanish adverbs allí and allá in the sixteenth century. The figures found in this study are quite different from those of previous research. Whereas some researchers have highlighted the common prevalence of allí, our data reveal a greater prominence of the form allá in this period, which was found to be more frequent in every single context taken into account in the analysis. This study considers the differences in the textual framework as a probable cause of these important quantitative divergences. At the same time, the paper uses tools from historical sociolinguistics to examine the incidence of the variable context in the selection of the adverbial forms. Our results confirm the influence of some constraints previously highlighted in the literature, but contradict others. Moreover, even the former need to be reinterpreted in variationist terms, and never as an expression of differences in the linguistic system.