Formation of lexical proto-doublets: Contributions from the analisys of dostor, güena, juerte, úrtimo and humirde, from Chilean spanish

Abstract

This article introduces the main conclusions of the doctoral thesis “Phonemic neutralisation as an lexical innovation mechanism in the forms dostor, güena, juerte, úrtimo and humirde of Chilean Spanish” (Cifuentes, 2016). Said investigation focused on two main aspects: a) the awareness of the distinctive value of consonant phonemes on neutralization position in (Chilean) Spanish; and b) the evidences of lexical bifurcation, extracted from the morphosyntactic distribution of proto-doublet forms; the opinions of a focus group on the meanings of those forms; and the results obtained from a survey applied to 200 speakers on the same topic. In this presentation, we analyse the semantic changes that take place in the cases studied, in order to determine the role
those changes could have had on phonological and sociostylistic factors. Thus, the situational and dialectal differences among the standard forms and the marked forms can account for the meaning gap: the high frequency with which the required inferences are made in order to extract those connotations produces the conventionalisation of those meanings. Thus, the derogatory connotations of dostor, úrtimo and humirde, and the sensory connotations of güena and juerte, become the regular meaning of expressions, i.e. they are conventionalised. In addition, general conclusions which emerge from all
the aspects considered in the major research are expressed.