Buch, Englisch, Band 55
Buch, Englisch, Band 55
Reihe: LINCOM Studies in Romance Linguistics
ISBN: 978-3-89586-181-9
Verlag: LINCOM
It can be contended that, from a sociolinguistic standpoint, the way Valdés’s work has generally been used impedes, rather than improves, our knowledge of what the objective usage picture of the language must have been at the time. This is because his comments are invariably cited, unquestioned, to confirm, explicitly or implicitly, the status of features in the language that have already been established by traditional scholarship via the narrow medium of literature and other formal written sources. This book has systematically addressed all three levels of this major problem in scholarship concerning the history of Castilian. It first defines the problem (which seems to have hitherto evaded scholars) through critical reviews of some of the influential works on Valdés and on the language, and proceeds to recast the Diálogo in a completely new light by classifying its linguistic content from Valdés’s viewpoint.
Finally, it investigates his linguistic behaviour, which unveils the reality behind his severe sociolinguistic value judgements, and, consequently, challenges the reader to seriously consider the inescapable implications of his pervasive linguistic self-correction for our knowledge of 16th-century Castilian.