The variation between simple and periphrastic possessors of 3rd person in Spanish

Abstract

In Spanish, possession in the third person can be expressed by simple possessive pronouns such as su(s), suyo(s)/a(s), as well as periphrastic forms such as de él, de ellos, de ella and de ellas. In addition to distinct morphological and syntactic characteristics, there are also differences between simple and periphrastic forms with respect to the recovery of the possessor. Simple possessives are morphologically opaque forms to the possessor's number and person information, as they serve not only to the pronominal frame of the 3rd person (él, ellos, ella, ellas), but also to the pronominal table of courtesy 2nd person (usted, ustedes). Periphrastic possessives, in turn, clearly recover the possessor of 3rd person (él, ellos, ella, ellas). This morphological opacity within the framework of simple third person forms is usually used to justify the use of periphrastic forms. In this sense, the present work investigates the variation between simple and periphrastic third-person possessives in Spanish, based on speech samples available in the Macrocorpus corpus and from a theoretical-methodological sociolinguistic perspective (WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 1968; LABOV, 1972; 1974).