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The purpose of this article is to show the form in which diverse theoretical approaches to the study of language with different (socio)linguistic interests –if they are classified this way or not in the specialized bibliography– can achieve diverse, but also complementary results, in the analysis of variation and language change in Spanish. From this general aim, the paper is devoted to discuss two interrelated objects: a) to review the main sides of contemporary sociolinguistic research, highlighting those having a clearer relationship with disciplines that also show an interest for the study of language in communicative context, like pragmatics and the analysis of interactions; and b) approaching from these different perspectives some outstanding questions in the research of Spanish language from synchronic as well as diachronic points of view. In this regard, the author comments diverse references of recent Hispanic bibliography about some topics (discourse markers, conversational routines, paralinguistic aspects of conversations, code-switching, pronouns, politeness strategies…), including his own research about some of them. As a main conclusion of this review, and contrary to more purist and restrictive approaches to the study of language, he concludes that this community of theoretical and methodological interests is not only licit from a scientific point of view, but also very beneficial for present sociolinguistics, whose seminal objective should be the analysis of language in social as well as in communicative context.

Using the variationist comparative method, the status of ambiguous lone Spanish-origin nouns in Catalan discourse is determined by analyzing their distribution and conditioning and by comparing them to their counterparts in unmixed Spanish or in multiple-word code-switches. Some areas of the nominal grammar have been selected for contrastive purposes (determination, complementation, gender, number) because they represent sites of coincidence as well as conflict between the two languages in contact, Spanish and Catalan. The main conclusion of this research is that Spanish-origin nouns in an otherwise Catalan context present grammatical variability similar to that of Catalan nouns, and that they behave differently from Spanish nouns in a monolingual context. In short, the grammar of these nouns is Catalan, and their categorial status is that of loanwords and not that of code-switches.