Approaching the history of accentuation: the case of a printed corpus from 18th century Guatemala

Abstract

One of the blank spots in the history of the Spanish language concerns the study of the accentuation from the 16th to the 18th century, on both sides of the Atlantic,
in both America and Spain. Therefore, I describe the accentuation in printed Guatemalan documents from the second half of the 18th century. In this corpus I have discovered the existence of three different kinds of accents, not homogeneously distributed: the acute, the grave and the circumflex accents. Moreover, I reveal the possible functions of the accentuation, its preferences in relation to the extension and type of words, as well as the relationships between the latter and other factors, such as the word-final phonetic context, morphosyntax and lexical forms. This research appears to show that there is no graphical chaos, but rather a standardization in progress of these uses.