La variación estilística en una situación de contacto de lenguas castellano-catalán: un estudio exploratorio

Abstract

This paper explores stylistic variation in a Spanish-Catalan language contact situation with the aim of testing if these transfer phenomena are more frequent in colloquial texts. To do so, I have analysed three features that are characteristic of Majorcan Spanish in documents from the 18th and 19th centuries: hacer 'do/make' collocations, the use of the verb pedir 'ask for something' with the semantic and syntactic structure of preguntar 'ask a question' and the preponderance of haber de over tener que as an obligation periphrasis. The analysis reveals that these three features are attested similarly in the two types of texts in our corpus. Only the most formal fragments of legal documents seem resistant to Catalan transfers.