Lexical bifurcation in protodoublets doctor/dostor, fuerte/juerte, buena/güena, último/úrtimo and humilde/humirde: evidences from the morphosyntactic distribution and the reaction of a focus group

Abstract

This paper is part of a more general research. Its main goal is describing the present state of the language and the changes suffered by 5 forms in Chilean Spanish. They are: dostor, úrtimo, güena, juerte y humirde. The description of these cases is relevant for the study of the etymological doublets formation because there are important similarities among these examples and some historical doublets. Cifuentes (2015a, 2015b), on the one hand, focuses on the awareness of distinctive value of consonantic phonemes in neutralization position in Chilean Spanish and the place of this phenomenon in lexical innovation. On the other hand, it focuses on the results of a survey applied to 200 Spanish speakers on protodoublet mean-ings.  In  this  particular  article,  we  focus  on  two  other  aspects  that  are  evidences  of  lexical  bifurcation in those cases. They are: the morphosyntactic distribution and the reaction of a focus group in relation to the mentioned doublets forms. We concluded that, in general, the protrodoublet forms have a different morphosyntactic distribution and also that the speak-ers make consistent semantic differences among them.