Cover not available
Part of
Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change
Edited by Richard J. Whitt
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 85] 2018
► pp. 261–280

Some methodological issues in the corpus-based study of morphosyntactic variation

The case of Old Spanish possessives

| University of the Balearic Islands

This paper has two main objectives: to point out some of the challenges surrounding the study of morphosyntactic variation and change through historical corpora, and to present some methodological alternatives to help alleviate these problems using the specific case study of the expression of possession in Old Spanish. The study highlights some methodological issues such as the definition of the context of occurrence of morphosyntactic variables and the problem of comparability of texts in diachronic corpora. In order to showcase some methodological alternatives the paper presents the results of a study on Old Spanish possessives that uses data from a parallel corpus of medieval Bible translations and a multinomial logistic regression analysis.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodological issues in the study of morphosyntactic variation
    • 2.1The problem of the comparability of texts
    • 2.2The problem of the comparability of contexts of occurrence
    • 2.3The problem of the comparability of variants of the same variable
  • 3.Parallel texts versus conventional corpora
    • 3.1The problem of the comparability of texts
    • 3.2The problem of the comparability of contexts of occurrence
    • 3.3The problem of the comparability of variants of the same variable
  • 4.New insights in the study of possession in Old Spanish
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.85.12enr
References
Company Company, Concepción
1994 Semántica y sintaxis de los posesivos duplicados en el español de los siglos XV y XVI. Romance Philology 48(2): 111–135.Google Scholar
2006 Persistencia referencial, accesibilidad y tópico: La semántica de la construcción artículo + posesivo + sustantivo en el español medieval. Revista de Filologia Española 86(1): 65–103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 Artículo + posesivo + sustantivo y estructuras afines. In Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española. Segunda parte: La frase nominal, Concepción Company Company (ed.), 759–880. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.Google Scholar
Eberenz, Rolf
2000 El español en el otoño de la Edad Media. Sobre el artículo y los pronombres. Madrid: Gredos.Google Scholar
Enrique-Arias, Andrés
2008 Biblias romanceadas e historia de la lengua. In Actas del VII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española, Concepción Company Company & José G. Moreno de Alba (eds), 1781–1794. Madrid: Arco Libros.Google Scholar
2009 Ventajas e inconvenientes del uso de Biblia Medieval (un corpus paralelo y alineado de textos bíblicos) para la investigación en lingüística histórica del español. In Diacronía de las lenguas iberorrománicas: Nuevas aportaciones desde la lingüística de corpus, Andrés Enrique-Arias (ed.), 269–283. Frankfurt: Vervuert; Madrid: Iberoamericana.Google Scholar
2012a Dos problemas en el uso de corpus diacrónicos del español: Perspectiva y comparabilidad. Scriptum Digital 1: 85–106.Google Scholar
2012b  Lingua eorum—la lengua d’ellos: Sobre la suerte de un calco sintáctico del latín en la historia del español. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 89: 813–829. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 On the usefulness of using parallel texts in diachronic investigations: Insights from a parallel corpus of Spanish medieval Bible translations. In New Methods in Historical Corpora, Paul Bennett, Martin Durrell, Silke Scheible & Richard J. Whitt (eds), 105–115. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Enrique-Arias, Andrés & Pueyo Mena, F. Javier
2008–2017 Biblia Medieval. [URL] (26 November 2014).Google Scholar
Jewish Publication Society
1985 Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text. Philadelphia PA: The Jewish Publication Society.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brian
2008 Historical linguistics in 2008. The state of the art. In Unity and Diversity of Languages, Piet van Sterkenburg (ed.), 175–188. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kaiser, Georg A.
2005 Bibelübersetzungen als Grundlage für empirische Sprachwandeluntersuchungen. In Romance Corpus Linguistics, II: Corpora and Diachronic Linguistics, Johannes Kabatek, Claus D. Pusch & Wolfgang Raible (eds), 71–83. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Labov, William
1982 Building on empirical foundations. In Perspectives on Historical Linguistics [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 24], Winfred P. Lehmann & Yakov Malkiel (eds), 17–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lapesa, Rafael
2000 [1970] Sobre el artículo ante posesivo en castellano antiguo. In Estudios de morfosintaxis histórica del español, Rafael Cano Aguilar & María Teresa Echenique Elizondo (eds), 413–435. Madrid: Gredos.Google Scholar
McEnery, Tony, & Xiao, Zhonghua
2007 Parallel and comparable corpora: The state of play. In Corpus-based Perspectives in Linguistics, Yuji Kawaguchi, Toshihiro Takagaki, Nobuo Tomimori & Yoichiro Tsuruga (eds), 131–145. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
R Development Core Team
2015 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL] (21 September, 2015).Google Scholar
Ripley, Brian & Venables, William
2015 nnet: Software for Feed-forward Neural Networks with a Single Hidden Layer, and for Multinomial Log-linear Models [R package version 7-3-11]. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Rosemeyer, Malte
2014 Auxiliary Selection in Spanish: Gradience, Gradualness, and Conservation [Studies in Language Companion Series 155]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosemeyer, Malte & Enrique-Arias, Andrés
2016 A match made in heaven. Using parallel corpora and multinomial logistic regression to analyze the expression of possession in Old Spanish. Language Variation and Change 28(3): 307–334. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali
2006 Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
de Vries, Lourens
2007 Some remarks on the use of Bible translations as parallel texts in linguistic research. In Parallel Texts: Using Translational Equivalents in Linguistic Typology. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF) 60: 95–99. Special issue ed. by Michael Cysow & Bernhard Wälchli.Google Scholar
Wanner, Dieter
2005 The corpus as a key to diachronic explanation. In Romance Corpus Linguistics II: Corpora and Diachronic Linguistics, Johannes Kabatek, Claus D. Pusch & Wolfgang Raible (eds), 31–44. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar