Discursive traditionality and morphosyntactic variation in the economic press of the Spanish Enlightenment

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the consolidation of the periodical press and the circulation of the Enlightenment ideas in Spain led to the creation of a new type of informative discourse that began to deal specifically with economic matters. The Spanish financial press combines at least two types of textual traditions. If, on the one hand, the economic issues evoke the memoirs published by arbitristas and proyectistas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their textual organization follows the model of the eighteenth-century periodical press. These diaries constitute a channel for the development of linguistic elaboration processes that took place in the sphere of communicative distance during the formation of early modern Spanish. We have selected two newspapers on this subject, the Semanario Economico and the Correo Mercantil de Espana y sus Indias, to provide new data about the morphosyntax of Spanish throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. The phenomena analyzed are: 2 the distribution of subjunctive and conditional verbal forms; 3 the pronominal enclysis; 4 the use of the passive and constructions with se; 5 the syntactic structure en + gerund and 6 the relative clauses.