"¿Ut grammatica poesis?"Salvá y la lengua de su novela "Irene y Clara"

Abstract

Vicente Salvá and José Mamerto Gómez Hermosilla, two of the most famous Spanish grammarians in the early 19th century, also co-authored an adaptation of a French novel which they titled Irene and Clara. In this paper we offer a detailed analysis of a bundle of key morphosintactic phenomena (among which third person clitic-object agreement, clitic position with regard to the main verb, clitic object doubling, negative agreement, selection of relative subordinators, selection of the subjunctive inflectional endings -ra / -se) as they appear in the novel, comparing this written usage with the prescriptive and descriptive judgments these two scholars offer in their respective grammatical works. Thus, we can check to which extent Irene and Clara's linguistic form served as a model for educated, standardized, high-register prose abiding by the normative proposals of Salvá and Hermosilla. In a reverse move, the data also allow to ascertain or profile rules or reccomendations which are just fuzzily sketched in the grammatical works. All in all, the data reveal that even standard European Spanish (as seen and defined by educated linguists) by 1830 was still a long way from coinciding with the current norm.