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In:Bridging Boundaries: Interdisciplinary perspectives on Hispanic Linguistics
Edited by Gregory L. Thompson and Scott M. Alvord
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 46] 2026
► pp. 12–37

Chapter 1
Nodes, networks, and redundancies

A constructional account of the Spanish comparative correlative construction

 | Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics | Slovak Academy of Sciences
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
The Spanish comparative correlative (CC) is a biclausal construction (e.g., [Cuanto más leo,]C1 [tanto más entiendo]C2) that is characterized by complex semantics and form. Previous studies have tried to account for it with maximally abstract rules. I present a corpus study, based on over 3,300 CC tokens from the Spanish Web 2018 corpus (Kilgarriff & Renau, 2013), whose results have implications for such analyses. Applying Hoffmann et al.’s (2019) methodology and expanding on my previous study on Spanish CCs (Horsch, 2024), I employ covarying-collexeme analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries, 2005, pp. 9–11) to detect cross-clausal associations between the two subclauses, C1 and C2. The results show statistically significant formal interdependencies between C1 and C2 — that is, what happens formally/syntactically in C1 influences what happens formally/syntactically in C1, and vice versa. In light of these findings, I argue that maximally abstract rules are insufficient for modeling the Spanish CC. Rather, the results indicate the existence of an elaborate network of interconnected constructions of varying degrees of abstractness. This network corresponds to the tenets of usage-based construction grammar, an approach that assumes that linguistic knowledge can be modeled as a complex network that, in the words of Traugott and Trousdale (2013), is “baroque, involving massive redundancy and vastly rich detail” (p. 53).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Previous analyses of the Spanish CC
    • 1.2A constructional approach to the Spanish CC
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Covarying-collexeme analysis
    • 2.2Corpus data
    • 2.3Variables
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Covarying-collexeme tables
    • 3.2The Spanish CC network
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • References
References (43)
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