" El que " y " aquel que "Dos formas relativas diferentes

Resumo

The Spanish relative form el que has been considered as the grammatical equivalent of theLatin construction is quid, with el as the antecedent of que, as was the case with is andquid. The truth is that the nominalized relative form el que has no structural equivalencewith the Latin construction is quid, since it contains the unstressed unit el, which is a newRomance resource, non-existent in Latin, to allow the invariable que to express the genericand numerical information of its unexpressed antecedent. The corresponding grammaticalconstruction of the relative with pronominal antecedent (is quid, ille quid …) is aquel que. Bothforms, el que and aquel que, have the same referential meaning, and what is to be expectedin synonymous constructions is that one of them ends up disappearing. The survival of bothconstructions in Spanish shows that, despite their referential equivalence, there is a linguisticrelevant difference between them. This difference is informative: the nominalized relative el que and the relative with pronominal antecedent aquel que are used in different contexts and with different informative purposes. This paper will briefly discuss these different conditions and purposes.