Corpus Del Research Articles

Verb–object compounds with Spanish dar ‘give’: an emergent gustar ‘like’-type construction

The purpose of this paper is to provide a usage-based approach to psychological constructions with dar ‘give’ in Spanish (e.g. me daba vergüenza pedir dinero en casa ‘I was embarrassed to ask for money at home’). Previous studies [Cuervo, Cristina. 2010. Two types of (apparently) ditransitive light verb constructions. In Karlos Arregi, Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Silvina Montrul & Annie Tremblay (eds.), Romance linguistics 2008: Interactions in romance. Selected papers from the 38th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Urbana-Champaign, April 2008, 139–56. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins] analyze these constructions as intransitive gustar ‘like’-type constructions. However, this analysis can only account for 40% of the examples we find in our corpus. Using natural occurring data taken from the oral section of Corpus del español [Davies, Mark. 2002. Corpus del español (100 million words, 1200s–1900s) (http://www.corpusdelespanol.org)] we provide an ‘emic’ or bottom-up approach [Hopper, Paul. 1998. Emergent grammar. In Michael Tomasello (ed.), The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to linguistic structure, 155–75. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Erlbaum; Hopper, Paul. 2004. The openness of grammatical constructions. Chicago Linguistic Society 40/2. 153–75] to these constructions by studying their recurrent grammatical patterns. The analysis of the examples we extract from the corpus reveals an emergent construction, namely [indirect object – dar + noun – subject] toward which specific tokens of use are moved. This construction is, however, open-ended, with fuzzy boundaries and constitutes the end-point of a grammaticalization process that is never reached. What we find in the data is a collection of examples that relate to each other through formal and functional resemblances.

La fijación léxica en el "Corpus diacrónico del español del Reino de Granada (CORDEREGRA)"

El estudio de las combinaciones léxicas según su grado de fijación y su distinción en combinaciones libres, colocaciones y locuciones ha sido realizado desde la perspectiva sincrónica. Planteamos la posibilidad de aplicar las pautas para distinguir estos tipos de estructuras en materiales de tipo diacrónico. Concretamente, nos basamos en los documentos que componen el Corpus del Español del Reino de Granada (CORDEREGRA) para valorar los materiales de este corpus histórico-lingüístico y comprobar si los criterios sincrónicos se pueden aplicar al estudio de documentos de otros siglos.

The role of grammatical metaphor in the development of advanced literacy in Spanish as a first, second, and heritage language

AbstractThis paper draws some general conclusions from the evidence gathered by two recent analyses, which traced the development of advanced literacy by two undergraduate language learner populations: (1) Humanities students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico for whom Spanish is a native language (L1); and (2) Linguistics students enrolled at the University of California, Davis for whom Spanish is either a heritage (HL) or a second language (L2). Textual scrutiny of student texts extracted from the Corpus del Lenguaje Académico en Español (or CLAE: <www.lenguajeacademico.info>) documents positive trends in the acquisition of ideational grammatical metaphors both in the monolingual, Spanish-only university setting of Mexico, and in the Spanish-English bilingual context of California. In this analysis, I propose that, regardless of the participants’ native language(s), learners of Spanish undergo parallel developmental stages within Halliday’s model of language acquisition at the advanced level.

Construction Grammar and Corpus Linguistics: The Example of Spanish Con Respecto a/de ‘with Respect to’

This study adopts a constructionist approach to the diachronic development of the Spanish topic marker con respecto a/de ‘with respect to’. The study is on the one hand qualitative, on the other hand quantitative in nature. Con respecto a/de is considered a construction, and its characteristics as well as its use are described. It is shown that the topic marking construction is used in various syntactic positions and that its frequency in use has increased over time. The data are retrieved from the corpus programme Corpus del español.

La representación del conocimiento especializado en los diccionarios electrónicos bilingües: Un estudio de caso

In recent decades, the number of new concepts and terms has risen rapidly due to scientific and technological development. Additionally, expert knowledge, which used to be exclusive for experts, also interests middlebrow language users. Compilers of e-dictionaries, aware of this change, are gathering in new editions specialised terms that have become part of our daily lives. In the current globalised world, the need to transfer scientific knowledge to other languages arises, so one of the main tools that translators and, specially, translation trainees employ to look up an unknown term are bilingual dictionaries. Hence, we consider that the study of the treatment given to computing terms in bilingual dictionaries is a field that needs to be reviewed. From an ad hoc corpus composed of texts from the main journals published in the UK and the USA, the most frequent terms belonging to computing are extracted using TermoStat Web 3.0 (Drouin, 2003). Then, we verify how terms are gathered in the dictionary wordlist, if they are labelled or not, which translation equivalents are given and if they are followed by contextual data. In addition, we check the use of the given equivalents in two Spanish reference corpora: Corpus del Espanol and Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual. The results from the analysis might suggest a need to take into account new proposals in order to implement the data gathered in these reference works as well as inform new procedures in the design and use of these tools from the point of view of translators as main users.

Using a Corpus in a 300‐Level Spanish Grammar Course

AbstractThe present study examined the use and effectiveness of a large corpus—the Corpus del Español (Davies, 2002)—in a 300‐level Spanish grammar university course. Students conducted hands‐on corpus searches with the goal of finding concordances containing particular types of collocations (combinations of words that tend to co‐occur) and tokens (any occurrence of a word or sequence of words), then used these examples from authentic texts in order to better understand and use the grammatical concepts under consideration (e.g., preterite vs. imperfect, ser and estar). The study was designed to better inform language educators' understanding of the extent to which access to, and active use of, a large corpus helped students better understand and use particular grammatical concepts and structures. Qualitative and quantitative data obtained from a student survey offer evidence that the corpus was an effective learning tool and represented an innovative use of technology.

De modificador aspectual a atenuador oracional

This study provides new data on the evolution of medio along the history of the Spanish language both from a distributional and a semantic point of view. With respect to the distributional perspective, this work shows, using data from Corpus del español, that the adverb medio extended its combinatorial possibilities throughout the centuries, from a small initial group of lexical categories to a larger lexical group and also to syntagmatic categories, including the clause or the sentence. As for the semantic perspective, this paper shows how this distributional extension involves a semantic change: medio evolved from aspectual to evaluative modifier and finally, in the twentieth century, to attenuator of sentence modality, understood in a broad sense.

Oraciones completivas de sustantivo: un análisis contrastivo entre portugués y español

El objetivo de este estudio es investigar la relación entre tres diferentes variantes de lo que se denomina la construcción encapsuladora (CxE) (Schmid 2000; Rodríguez Espiñeira 2010), es decir, las secuencias N de que-oración completiva, N que-oración completiva y N de + infinitivo. Se contrastan las tres variantes de la construcción en español y portugués con el fin de averiguar si existen diferencias significativas entre ambas lenguas, algo que cabe asumir teniendo en cuenta dos hechos diferenciadores: a) la ausencia del dequeísmo como tal en portugués y, b) la existencia del infinitivo flexionado en portugués. El análisis se basa en dos grandes corpus electrónicos, el Corpus del español (Davies 2002-) y el Corpus do portugués (Davies & Ferreira 2006-) y tiene como marco teórico la Gramática de construcciones (CxG). Así, el punto de partida son las secuencias N de que, N que y N de infinitivo, cuyos usos en las dos lenguas se investigan mediante el análisis colostruccional (Collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003)). El análisis se concentra específicamente en los diferentes sustantivos que aparecen en la posición de núcleo de la CxE. Las diferencias en la combinatoria léxica de las tres variantes de la CxE se interpretan como indicios de divergencias y semejanzas entre ellas.DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.15304/verba.42.1856

Light verb constructions in Latin American newspapers

This article examines the occurrence of variant forms of Spanish light verb constructions (LVCs) in a seven-million-word corpus of contemporary newspaper texts from seven Latin American countries. The findings from this corpus are compared with results from a previous study using a corpus of scholarly writing; additional information from a diachronic perspective is provided by data from the Corpus del Español. The structures selected for discussion are complex LVCs (e.g., tener un vínculo o relación), and tokens containing calques (e.g., dar un clic), loan words (e.g., tener un look) and affixes (e.g., dar goplecitos). This study provides evidence of the creative and expressive potential of less frequent types of these formulaic structures. While tokens containing calques and loan words appear almost exclusively in the newspaper corpus, complex LVCs appear with comparable frequency in both corpora. The discussion of the morphosyntactic features of these variant LVC types is accompanied by examples extracted from the corpus.

“Los gerundios ‘analógicos’ en la historia del español”

Fecha de recepción: 1 de diciembre de 2012.Fecha de aceptación: 3 de octubre de 2013. El presente trabajo se centra en la documentación y en la distribución geográfica (histórica y actual) de los llamados gerundios ‘analógicos’ del español (tuviendo, quisiendo), sobre la base de los datos de varios corpus lingüísticos (CORDE, CREA, Corpus del español, ALPI y COSER). Revisamos las explicaciones analógicas previas sobre estas formas y establecemos una explicación sobre la extensión del tema de perfecto al gerundio, basada en el condicionamiento fonológico. También defendemos que la explicación fonológica está en relación con las nociones estables del cambio morfológico, desde la teoría de la morfología natural.

Throwing results

This article explores synonymy and polysemy in the interaction of meaning and the elements that a verb combines with. It presents a corpus-based analysis of four Spanish verbs (tirar, lanzar, arrojar and echar) whose primary meaning is ‘to throw.’ A four-hundred sentence sample extracted from the Corpus del Español 1900s subcorpus serves as the basis for this study. Statistical tests are used to compare the verbs’ behavior across several factors: morphological markings such as mood, tense and person, the types of subjects (human versus nonhuman), the types of objects (concrete versus nonconcrete), and the interaction of subject and object in full constructions. The tests are accompanied by semantic analysis of the sample sentences. The result of the statistical and descriptive analyses is a radial categorization that highlights the types of metaphoric and metonymic extensions that each verb uses, and where and how the verbs overlap semantically.

The Functions of Postverbal Pronominal Subjects in Spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese

Abstract Although both constituent order and variation in the expression of pronominal subjects are well-established research topics in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics, the placement of pronominal subjects has received relatively little attention in previous research. The goal of the present study is to fill this gap by examining postverbal pronominal subjects in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese using data from the Corpus del Español and Corpus do Português, taking into account such factors as verb semantics and transitivity. It is shown that the factors affecting the placement of pronominal subjects differ from those related to nominal subjects, as pronouns typically represent old information in discourse. Pronominal subjects are relatively uncommon in the postverbal position in both languages, but especially in European Portuguese where they appear mostly in grammaticalized constructions (e.g. quotatives). The postverbal placement of pronominal subjects is often related to non-topical status of the subject and serves a backgrounding function in discourse. It is most frequently associated with twoargument verbs characterized by low transitivity.

K dixez? A corpus study of Spanish Internet orthography

New technologies have always influenced communication, by adding new ways of communication to the existing ones and/or changing the ways in which existing forms of communication are utilized. This is particularly obvious in the way in which computer-mediated communication (CMC) has had an impact on com- munication. In this exploratory article, we are concerned with some character- istics of a newly evolving form of Spanish Internet orthography that differ from standard Spanish spelling. Three types of deviations from 'the norm' are consid- ered: a reduction (post-vocalic d/() deletion in -ado), a transformation (namely the spelling change from ch to x), and reduplication (of characters). Based on a corpus of approximately 2.7 million words of regionally balanced informal inter- net Spanish compiled in 2008, we describe the spelling changes and discuss a variety of sometimes interacting factors governing the rates of spelling variants such as overall frequency effects, functional (pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and iconicity-related) characteristics, and phonological constraints. We also compare our findings to data from Mark Davies's (2002) Corpus del Espanol (100 million words, 1200s-1900s, http://www.corpusdelespanol.org) as well as other sources and relate them to the discussion of the register/genre of Internet language.

La recategorización del adverbio medio en español

According to traditional descriptive grammars, Spanish medio (‘half’) is a variable category. It can be a noun (medio de vida), a numeral adjective (quantifier) (media docena), or an unstressed adverb (estaba medio cansado). However, medio takes an invariable form as an adverb in standard Spanish (estaba medio cansada). Making the adverb medio agree with the adjective it modifies (estaba *media cansada) is considered nonstandard. Numerous cases are attested where the adverb medio agrees, as though it were an adjective, with the noun or the adjective which it modifies. This process, known as ‘recategorization’ implies that an element is interpreted as belonging to one category (i.e. adjective) in some varieties and as part of another (here, adverb) in other varieties. The ‘adjectivization’ of medio is widely considered to be characteristic of Latin American Spanish varieties, but it is believed to be rare in Iberian Spanish. In this study I use unpublished dialect data from the ALPI (Atlas Linguistico de la Peninsula Iberica) to examine the precise geographical area of the phenomenon in Peninsular Spanish. These data clearly show that the distribution of this phenomenon is much wider than previously claimed, since it is attested not only in the Galician area but also in Leonese and in Andalusian, the latter being the probable source for the transfer of the phenomenon to Latin American Spanish. We also use historical and contemporary data from both Peninsular and Latin American texts (Corpus del espanol) to analyse some specific cases of adverbial medio with and without agreement (medio/media tonta), and to study the semantic interpretations associated with each variant.

On the Emergence of Personal Infinitives in the History of Spanish

The aim of this article is twofold: (a) To evaluate the learned source for the rise of personal infinitives in the history of Spanish, and (b) to address the issue of the origin of personal infinitives from the perspective of language acquisition. It is argued, by means of novel empirical evidence derived from the Corpus del Español, that the Latin Accusativus cum Infinitivo source is responsible for the personal infinitive in complement position in Old Castilian (in line with Pountain 1998). However, this learned source is not the source of the Modern Spanish personal infinitive in adjunct position. For the latter, an acquisitional scenario is put forward whereby changes in the primary linguistic data (cf. Lightfoot 1999) made adjunct personal infinitives possible.

On the life and death of a collocation

This paper seeks to shed light on the diachronic evolution of collocations by examining structures formed in Modern Spanish with dar “give” plus state nouns (e.g. dar miedo “frighten”, literally, “give fear”). Using the Corpus del español, I offer a quantitative and qualitative analysis of eighteen representative dar miedo-type collocations from the 1200s to the 1900s. The results show that although the basic properties of dar miedo-type structures have remained remarkably stable over the centuries, during the Middle Ages the verb hacer “make” was used here almost as often as dar — a competition apparently inherited from Latin. While different nouns show different patterns of loss of hacer, echoing the lexical diffusion of certain grammatical changes, the 1500s saw a very sharp decline in “make” cases across the board, leading to its complete disappearance from this context by the 1800s. The loss of hacer led to a radical simplification of the collocational properties of state nouns in Spanish vis-à-vis Latin and other Modern Romance varieties. This process resulted both from language-internal factors mostly related to the lexical semantics of dar and hacer and from three key sociolinguistic processes in 16th-century Spanish: koineization, change of norm and increased standardization.