The alternation in Spanish between y and e on the one hand, and u and o in the other, is examined. It is proposed that the standard account under which the choice of one variant over the other is sensitive only to the phonetic context is incomplete. Specifically, the paper argues that pragmatic inferences that typically appear cross-linguistically associated with these connectors, and that result in asymmetric interpretations, are not favoured in Spanish with the morphological variants e and u, which favour symmetric interpretations. The paper proposes that the relevant pragmatic inferences have been partially conventionalized for y and o, but that this conventionalization has not occurred in the case of e and u for the reason that they are much less frequently used. Thus, discussion and data offer a view of a stage in a gradual process of semantic change via conventionalization of pragmatic inferences.

一方面检查y和e之间的西班牙语交替，另一方面检查u和o之间的交替。提出的标准说明是不完整的，在该标准说明下，一个变体的选择仅对语音上下文敏感。具体而言，该论文认为，通常在西班牙语中与这些连接器存在跨语言关联并导致不对称解释的实用推论在西班牙语中不赞成使用形态学变体e和u，这有利于对称解释。本文提出，对于y和o，部分相关的语用推断已被常规化。，但是在e和u的情况下并没有发生这种常规化，因为它们的使用频率要低得多。因此，讨论和数据提供了通过实用化推理的惯例在语义变化的渐进过程中的一个阶段的观点。