The “Conquista Espiritual del Reino de Chile”, by Diego de Rosales, as a source for the study of the morphosyntax of colonial Chilean Spanish

Abstract

The text of the “Conquista Espiritual del Reino de Chile”, of the Jesuit Diego de Rosales, is a do-cument that not only tells the particular circumstances of the lives of various religious of the Order (Brothers and Priests), but also constitutes a referential text concerning the discursive manifestation, textual typology and characterization of Spanish of Chile of the time itself. It should be noted that, although we are in the presence of a prominent religious, of an Order characteristically well represented, among other things, the linguistic-cultural aspects, the text we studied, from this perspective, is rather far from those standards and more close to what we have seen in other documentation varied in nature, in the Kingdom of Chile during the colonial period.This article presents the most relevant aspects in terms of word syntax, syntactic cons-tructions and verbal flection, according to a previous morphosyntactic characterization, which will serve as initial theoretical framework, which has been cited in Contreras (2009) which will serve as matrix features.Regarding the first, the matrix includes the characterization of nouns (gender, suffixes), adjectives (superlatives, suffixes), prepositions, adverbs, determiners (articles), use of pro-nouns (order unstressed pronouns, relative pronouns) and leísmo, laísmo and loísmo. Moreo-ver, as for the second aspect, it will consider aspects of the construction of the noun phrase, transitivity and intransitivity, passive formations, with “se”, subordination, predication, nega-tion and construction of the verbal phrase. Finally, regarding verbal inflection, the use of ten-ses, the use of specific verbs, verbal tense/sentence syntax relationship, temporary adverbial complements, use of auxiliaries and non personal forms of verbs.