Condicionamientos internos en la variación de los pronombres personales átonos en Los hechos de Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the linguistic factors constraining the use of personal clitics lo(s), la(s), le(s) in XVth Century Middle-Age Castilian, as revealed in the Relación de los Hechos de Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (1458). A multivariate analysis of data from this text shows that internal (morphological, syntactic, lexical and textual) factors interact and allows us to imagine the simplest and original context where leísmo could start. A nearly categorical tendency to employ le for male referents as direct objects is developed with human antecedents and where Latin used dative case or alternated between dative and accusative case. If Latin used accusative case, occurrence of le (leísmo) depends on a set of linguistic constraints whose effect is systematic and predictable, as shows a logistic regression analysis carried out in this paper. Use of le (leísmo) for human antecedents is constrained by the following internal factors: etymology, the number and the clitic's position within the sentence, type of syntactic structure and the verb's tense.