“You Took the Word Out of My Mouth”: A Morphosyntactic and Semantic Analysis of a Phraseological Lexicon of Colombian Spanish

Abstract

Phraseology has been widely studied in Linguistics. However, to date, the representation of phraseological units (Henceforth PUs) in lexicographic resources of dialectal Spanish variants has not been explored in detail. This paper addresses this issue through an analysis of PUs in a phraseological lexicon of Colombian Spanish. In order to perform this analysis, a database was compiled with more than 4,000 entries from the Lexicon de fraseologia del espanol de Colombia (henceforth LFEC) (Mora Monroy 1996). The database was tokenized, lemmatized, and tagged; and then morphosyntactic and semantic patterns were extracted. The contribution of this paper is three-fold, (i) It presents a sample of the most frequent syntactic patterns (e.g. V Det N = agachar la cabeza) extracted from the LFEC, (ii) it describes how semantic patterns can be extracted through semantic tagging using the UCREL semantic analysis system (USAS) (Archer et al. 2002), and (iii) it presents a frequency analysis of some lexical components of the extracted PUs that can shed light on some of the basic tenets of Cognitive Semantics. More than 700 morphosyntactic patterns and more than 1,300 semantic patterns were identified from the database. This collection of both syntactic and semantic patterns, along with an analysis of their co-occurrence, may help enhance the scripts and tools used nowadays for the extraction of PUs in general and specialized languages.