El le invariable en el Español escrito de Chile

Abstract

The non-concordant use of the Spanish dative clitic le with a plural indirect object (IO) appeared early in Spanish and continues to occur to the present day. Phonetic, morphosyntactic and pragmatic explanations have been proposed to account for this phenomenon. The present paper analyzes a corpus of 463 million words of written Chilean Spanish for the purpose of studying the invariable (non-concordant) le and the concordant les used with plural IOs. Both their order of appearance in sentences and the phenomenon's distribution in different text types were analyzed. The results show that the frequency of the non-concordant le depends on both its position relative to the IO and certain properties of the discourse contexts in which it occurs. We conclude that of the three hypotheses, only the pragmatic one is compatible with the results of the study.