Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen

¿Colocolo o lo coloco?: The position of the clitic pronoun in old Spanish

ConclusionIn this article I have tried to demonstrate that in Old Spanish the placement of the clitic pronoun relative to the verb is used by the speaker as a functional, syntactic device to warn the hearer that things are not as easy as they may seem to be. So, clitic placement in Old Spanish shows that the human factor again seems to play a decisive role in the structure of language (Diver 1975: 3).The question:do I have to place the clitic after or before the verb?, as paraphrased in the title of this article, in old times would not drive a speaker crazy, unlike the wordslo co-loco ‘crazy-crazy’ could suggest. After all, it was up to the speaker to use that functional device in order to secure his own communicative interests, i.e., to get his message across.

Variación de colocación de los pronombres átonos en el español antiguo

La colocacion de los pronombres ätonos (PAs) ha sido un tema frecuentemente estudiado desde finales del siglo XIX. Esto parece deberse a las diferencias distribucionales de los PAs antiguos en comparacion con sus variantes modernes. Compärense los cuatro ejemplos aqui abajo que muestran posposicion en una oracion principal (1), anteposicion en una oracion principal (2), anteposicion en una oracion subordinada (3) y posposicion en una oracion subordinada (4).