Historical Grammar, Not a "Linguistics of Errors": On the Syntax of Lazarillo de Tormes

Pronominal usages found in the sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes are claimed to be characteristic of premodern stages of Romance languages, ie, Old Spanish & Old French are typologically less consistent than their descendants. Although modern structures are evidenced from the beginning of written documents, during the medieval period they coexisted with alternative forms, evidenced in the case of Spanish by a tendency to use more overt subject pronouns, fewer doubled object pronouns, more case-free nonagreeing left extractions, & fewer prepositional accusatives. 20 References. J. Hitchcock