El fenómeno del laísmo en textos inquisitoriales de tribunales andaluces (siglos XVIII y XIX)
The Grammatical Phenomenon of Laísmo in Documents Generated by the Andalusian Inquisition Court (18th and 19th Centuries)

Summary/Abstract: The Spanish Inquisition generated a number of interesting and very useful working papers, which are a highly valuable source of information to the History of Spanish Language. Particular attention should be drawn, in our opinion, to the “alegación fiscal”, an 18th century type of document generated by the “Holy Office” (the institution of the Spanish Inquisition), which is the heir to the type of document known as “relaciones de causa”. This new type of texts synthesized the inquisition process (“the process of faith”) in an unofficial working draft . The specific characteristics of the “alegación fiscal”, including the speed with which texts were written or the fact that they were not designed for publishing, bring this type of document closer to immediacy texts. They also provide additional information on the Spanish language from the 18th century. The present study examines 13 “alegaciones fiscales” (18th and 19th centuries) from the Inquisition Court of Granada, Cordoba and Seville. Th ese texts include several number of cases of “laísmo”, a grammatical phenomenon which is infrequent in Southern Spanish. We aim to analyse the frequency of “laísmo” in this type of documents. Evidence from recent research shows that this grammatical phenomenon was widespread during the 18th century, even in Andalusian or Southern Spanish (Sáez Rivera 2008, Vaamonde 2015).

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