Morphosyntactic features of Chilean Spanish during the 17th century: analysis of the unpublished manuscript La restauración de La Imperial y conversión de las almas infieles (c. 1693), written by the Mercedarian friar Juan de Barrenechea y Albis

Abstract

This paper presents a morphosyntactic analysis of the colonial Chilean chronicle La restauración de La Imperial y conversión de las almas infieles (c. 1693), written by the Mercedarian friar Juan de Barrenechea y Albis. Most features in the corpus could be explained by two interrelated motives. On the one hand, the examined characteristics are present in Chilean Spanish and in some areas of Latin America during the 17th century. On the other hand, the author’s high sociocultural level is responsible for the creation of this especially highbrow text among colonial Chilean chronicles, that includes linguistic phenomena of Medieval Spanish and the Spanish Golden Age