The direction of linguistic change. Clitics in Corrientes and Buenos Aires

Abstract

In honor of the linguist Inés Abadía de Quant and in recognition of her dedication to the study of linguistic varieties in contact with Guaraní, this paper contrasts the use of third-person clitic pronouns lo, la and le in Corrientes and in Buenos Aires, as two “centers of differentiated dialect zones” in Argentina. From the concept of “intraparadigmatic play”, the communicative and ethnopragmatic strategies underlying the differentiated use of the clitics are described. It is argued that, from the same meanings, different exploitations crystallize in different categorizations of the semantic substance. Evaluating the participation of the actant in the event as more active or more affected underlies the communication strategy. The cognitive processes of activating the participant in the event in Corrientes and affecting the participant in Buenos Aires allow an ethnopragmatic explanation and contribute to the debate on the direction of change.