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The present paper will be focusing on the study of three specific phenomena of the Spanish language in the original manuscript of El Cantar de Mio Cid, an epic poem that has been formed between the twelfth and the fourteenth century. The phenomena under consideration are leísmo, the prepositional direct object and reduplication, all of which still exist in contemporary Spanish. These are innovative phenomena of morphosyntactic variation, which means they are used in alternation with their variant that was inherited from Latin. On the one hand, reduplication and, to a lesser extent, the prepositional direct object, are phenomena that are largely established in the language, and are even obligatory in some contexts. Leísmo, on the other hand, is a more controversial and stigmatised phenomenon.To obtain a more profound view of the manuscript and the three phenomena we will be studying, we will start by explaining the importance of El Cantar de Mio Cid for Spanish historiography and linguistics. Furthermore, we will take a closer look at Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the first linguist to have made a scientific analysis of the poem, as well as three other studies that have been conducted more recently and which focus exclusively on the three phenomena, i.e. Flores Cervantes (2002), Chantal Melis (1995) and Timo Riiho (1988). After this, we will analyse all the instances of leísmo, the prepositional direct object and reduplication in the manuscript, and investigate the contexts in which they appear.In the analysis, the most important factors will be the general distribution of each phenomenon in the text, its degree of animacy, and its linguistic gender and number. On the basis of these data, we will be able to compare the contexts of these early appearances of the phenomena with the contexts in which they occur nowadays. Moreover, we will look at the influence of some of the factors that have been introduced in previous studies, as well as investigate Melis' decision of...