'¿ERA BIN LADEN UN LÍDER DE LOS TALIBÁN?...¿O DE LOS TALIBANES?': PRESIONES EXTERNAS E INTERNAS EN UN FENÓMENO RECIENTE DE VARIACIÓN MORFOLÓGICA EN ESPAÑOL

Abstract

The present article study a recent phenomenon of morphological variation in Spanish (los talibán/ los talibanes), that has generated an important debate about the norms that this languaje must follow in the grammatical integration of loanwords´s plurals in Spanish. From the theoretical and methodological principles of recente variationism, the author of this paper analyse the most important linguistic and non linguistic factors involved in this variability, as well as in the first steps of a linguistic change in progress that is now developing in peninsular Spanish. Between the former highlight some factors, like the type of determination or the presence of parallel structures in the same speech event. Nevertheless, the importance of theses are obscured by other of extra-linguistic nature, mainly the normative and ideological debate established around this matter between some members of the Spanis Real Academia, as well as certain influent intellectuals and journalists. Nevertheless, the significance of this influence is much bigger in the journalist register than in the speech of ordinary people, whose patterns of variation and linguistic change are more similar to natural tendencies in oral languaje. The article analyses also other factors that allow discovering new differences between the two corpora studied.