Some methodological issues in the corpus-based study of morphosyntactic variation
The case of Old Spanish possessives
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
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Acknowledgments
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Notes
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References
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Appendix