Loss of the old Spanish -udo participle: A corpus-based study

The --udo past participle, once common for second conjugation verbs in Castilian Spanish, disappeared completely by the 15th century, having been replaced by the --ido participle form of the third conjugation. In this study, I consider several of the factors proposed to have contributed to the sudden disuse of --udo by analyzing participle use in a corpus from the 13th century, which coincided with the height of the variation between the old form in --udo and the new one in --ido . Through the use of this corpus, titled Prose Works of Alfonso X el Sabio (Gago Jover, 2011), I show that not all verbs of this time period were affected by the change in the same way. That is to say that certain verbs significantly favor either the form in --udo or that in --ido within these texts. These patterns allow us to analyze factors capable of causing the loss of the --udo form such as the rapid increase in adjectives in --udo (Malkiel, 1992) and the movement of deadjectival -ir verbs to the -ecer paradigm (Dworkin, 1985; Harris-Northall, 1999). We also analyze patterns of participle use within each text of the corpus demonstrating that certain texts show significantly more --udo forms while others show significantly more --ido ones. We conclude this study by showing that while both the identity of the text and the identity of the verb can be strong predictors of participle choice, neither is persistently stronger than the other. Each case is individual: sometimes the tendency of the verb is stronger than that of the text and vice versa.