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A recent biography of Cervantes characterizes his literary career as “the conquest of irony”. This appreciation is particularly on target when addressing the study of El Quijote, which in itself represents a satire on the genre of cavalry novels. The aim of this paper is to explore some linguistic mechanisms that are widely present in the novel and relate them with the general context of the Spanish language at the beginning of the 17th century. The first part of El Quijote is published slightly over a century after the first Spanish grammar. During that period, Castilian Spanish had become a language of culture, with a rich and growing literary legacy. However, the situation of grammatical studies on Spanish was still very incipient. After the publication of Nebrija’s grammar in 1492, the few grammatical treatises of Spanish published before 1605 were specifically addressed to foreign learners. But the idea of publishing grammars for native speakers was going to make headway in the following decades due to two independent factors. On the one hand, the extraordinary progression of Castilian as a language of culture, in which Cervantes is a fundamental cornerstone. On the other hand, the rationalist turn that conceives the study of grammar as an inquiry concerning human reason. When analyzing the language of El Quijote, it is important to take into account that there was not a well-established normative codification of Spanish at that moment. Some critics in the 19th century, following the Neoclassic norms, criticized a large number of alleged grammatical errors in the novel (anacolutha, syllepses, expletive reiterations), but the vast majority correspond to variants that were usual in the colloquial speech of that period. An important trait of the language of Cervantes is the stylistic use of the grammatical resources. We will study a case in point: the literary exploitation of the noun ellipsis or zeugma.
