La lengua de Mateo Alemánestudio lingüístico e ideológico

Abstract

Although Mateo Alemán was an important literary author of the Spanish Golden Age, there are no studies about the language of his texts. This is the objective of this doctoral dissertation. After the publication in 2012 of the new edition of Guzmán de Alfarache edited by D. Luis Gómez Canseco and of La Obra Completa in 2014 edited by Pedro Piñero and Katharina Niemeyer, it was necessary to explore the texts of an author who was so concerned about his language that he wrote an Orthography. Throughout the 16th century there were multiple works on language by several authors. The humanist philosophy that prevailed among the scholars of the period favoured the development of the arts, sciences and literature, and with it the discussion concerning the language they speaked. Thus, these linguistic essays about the Spanish language were a praise of Spanish as a language of culture against Latin, the vehicular language during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age. Among the literary authors of this period with an express linguistic awareness we find the exceptional case of Mateo Alemán, author of the Ortografía Castellana , often forgotten in contrast to his best recognized work, the Guzmán de Alfarache . This work has great interest due to several reasons: Alemán published it at the end of his life, in Mexico, after the sucess of Guzmán, and it has been considered as the first notable attempt to reform the Spanish orthography Therefore, and taking into account that Alemán is from Seville, we find a singular spanish speaker and writer who creates, in turn, a character with a particular idiosyncrasy, Guzmán: a narrator-protagonist from a low social class, who travels all over Spain until he arrives in Italy and talks along the way with people from diverse origins and different speech styles. In addition, Alemán lived at a moment when Seville's diatopic varieties were losing their prestige with the arrival to America against the Madrid and Valladolid varieties spoken in the Spanish capital. This factor is fundamental in the impact that its Orthography and its linguistic use in general had among other scholars of its century. This work, represents an advance in the study of the history of Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also provides a new vision by taking into account the sociolinguistic dimensions of the speaker Mateo Alemán. He was a man who lived in Seville, Madrid, Lisbon and Mexico. He contemplated the linguistic change and the dialectal evolution caused by the colonization of America. In a certain way, he was a part of this and that's the reason why he had the possibility of reflecting his linguistic thought in his work. The purpose of this doctoral dissertation is to analyze the language, the linguistic uses of the XVI and XVII century writer Mateo Alemán, author of the Guzmán de Alfarache and the Ortografía Castellana (Castilian Orthography ), among other books. The objectives of this research are: 1. To define Mateo Alemán's linguistic ideas within his period. 2. To observe the relationships that his Orthography has with previous and later linguistic discussions. 3. To study to which degree he applies his linguistic awareness to the writing of his work, including the Guzmán de Alfarache . 4. To explain the phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the language of Mateo Alemán, as well as its diatopic, diastolic and diaphasic characterization. 5. To analyze the language of Mateo Alemán in regard to the linguistic uses of its period, comparing it with the data obtained from other corpus studies of the language of these decades. 6. To establish a synchronic state of language in the texts of Mateo Alemán, offering a panorama in relation to its cultural context. To determine the importance of its linguistic uses in the constitution of its literature.Although Mateo Alemán was an important literary author of the Spanish Golden Age, there are no studies about the language of his texts. This is the objective of this doctoral dissertation. After the publication in 2012 of the new edition of Guzmán de Alfarache edited by D. Luis Gómez Canseco and of La Obra Completa in 2014 edited by Pedro Piñero and Katharina Niemeyer, it was necessary to explore the texts of an author who was so concerned about his language that he wrote an Orthography. Throughout the 16th century there were multiple works on language by several authors. The humanist philosophy that prevailed among the scholars of the period favoured the development of the arts, sciences and literature, and with it the discussion concerning the language they speaked. Thus, these linguistic essays about the Spanish language were a praise of Spanish as a language of culture against Latin, the vehicular language during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age. Among the literary authors of this period with an express linguistic awareness we find the exceptional case of Mateo Alemán, author of the Ortografía Castellana , often forgotten in contrast to his best recognized work, the Guzmán de Alfarache . This work has great interest due to several reasons: Alemán published it at the end of his life, in Mexico, after the sucess of Guzmán, and it has been considered as the first notable attempt to reform the Spanish orthography Therefore, and taking into account that Alemán is from Seville, we find a singular spanish speaker and writer who creates, in turn, a character with a particular idiosyncrasy, Guzmán: a narrator-protagonist from a low social class, who travels all over Spain until he arrives in Italy and talks along the way with people from diverse origins and different speech styles. In addition, Alemán lived at a moment when Seville's diatopic varieties were losing their prestige with the arrival to America against the Madrid and Valladolid varieties spoken in the Spanish capital. This factor is fundamental in the impact that its Orthography and its linguistic use in general had among other scholars of its century. This work, represents an advance in the study of the history of Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It also provides a new vision by taking into account the sociolinguistic dimensions of the speaker Mateo Alemán. He was a man who lived in Seville, Madrid, Lisbon and Mexico. He contemplated the linguistic change and the dialectal evolution caused by the colonization of America. In a certain way, he was a part of this and that's the reason why he had the possibility of reflecting his linguistic thought in his work. The purpose of this doctoral dissertation is to analyze the language, the linguistic uses of the XVI and XVII century writer Mateo Alemán, author of the Guzmán de Alfarache and the Ortografía Castellana (Castilian Orthography ), among other books. The objectives of this research are: 1. To define Mateo Alemán's linguistic ideas within his period. 2. To observe the relationships that his Orthography has with previous and later linguistic discussions. 3. To study to which degree he applies his linguistic awareness to the writing of his work, including the Guzmán de Alfarache . 4. To explain the phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the language of Mateo Alemán, as well as its diatopic, diastolic and diaphasic characterization. 5. To analyze the language of Mateo Alemán in regard to the linguistic uses of its period, comparing it with the data obtained from other corpus studies of the language of these decades. 6. To establish a synchronic state of language in the texts of Mateo Alemán, offering a panorama in relation to its cultural context. To determine the importance of its linguistic uses in the constitution of its literature.