Feminine morphology in possessive complements of adverbial constructions in Andalusian varieties

Abstract

The present study scrutinizes the Spanish morphological variation between masculine and feminine possessive complements used with locative adverbials (e.g. cerca mío / mía ‘close to me’). The feminine -a suffix (e.g. mia) is the innovative variant and has been described by normative grammars as a low-frequency and stigmatized trait. This paper focuses on Andalusian Spanish, where the innovative -a-suffix has the highest frequency of use. Twitter data from the eight provinces of Andalusia are compiled in order to determine the innovation’s diatopic distribution and linguistic diffusion. The quantitative results show that the -a variant predominates in all Andalusia and that the change has spread through all the adverbial locative contexts. We propose a series of analogical extensions have taken place whereby the feminine possessive complement spreads from one adverbial context to another, creating an analogical snowballing effect.