El fenómeno de simplificación en el español chileno. Un estudio comparativo entre personajes de diferentes clases sociales en Martín Rivas de Alberto Blest Gana.

Abstract

The dialogues of the Chilean novel Martín Rivas by Alberto Blest Gana show an imitation of the spoken language through the orthography of the vocabulary. This graphic representation varies depending on the social class of the character. In a comparative study of the graphic representation in the dialogues of three social classes: the upper class, the middle class and the lower class, we analyse what differences in the spoken language are present in each of these classes. Supported by theory and previous studies about the various linguistic phenomena of the Spanish variant spoken in Chile, we focus on two of these, which indicate a simplification present in the studied novel and the Chilean Spanish: the elision and the synaloepha. The study shows a difference in the graphic representation of the spoken language of the upper class and the two lower classes, but not between the middle class and the lower class. It is also evident that the context affects the linguistic usage of the middle class.