| Abstract: | In the history of Spanish there are five forms, originally from the same lexical item, co‐existing: así, asín, ansí, asina, and ansina, all meaning ‘like that’. Standard Modern Spanish includes only one of these: así. This is not the case, however, in New Mexican Spanish. This corpus‐based study examines the patterns of synchronic variation in New Mexican Spanish, as well as the near death and transformed rebirth of forms other than standard así in literature. Multivariate analysis suggests a decline in non‐standard variants in New Mexico, associated with rural activities and objects, and with older, less‐educated speakers. The synchronic idiosyncrasy of stereotypes is confirmed, while the quantitative diachronic patterns found may prove to be a regular pattern for developing stereotypes in literary texts: a slow decline in frequency followed by a sharp rise. |
