“Decorative” morphology in Spanish: when typology meets sociolinguistics (and vice versa)

Human languages are hypothesized to be adapted to the functions they fulfill. Specifically, their structure has been claimed to be optimized for efficient communication and easy learning. Nonetheless, languages also exhibit many “extravagant” features, with no clear straight role in information transfer or language acquisition. Building on typological research on this topic, in this paper we present evidence that varieties of Spanish (colloquial mostly) feature the type of “decorative” morphology found in some world languages. We provide a detailed characterization of such morphology and further hypothesize some potential functions for this “extravagant” feature. We conclude by advocating for a sociopragmatics approach to intralinguistic variation that considers the findings by language typology, but also for a typological approach to language diversity that takes into account findings by variationist sociolinguistics. Ultimately, our study argues for a unitary view of linguistic variation and for taking “secondary” language functions (like aesthetics or play) into account when explaining the design features of human languages.