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Grammar studies have focused lately on speech instead of on written language, being the latter the most traditional approach. This situation confronts us with the necessity of a new definition for some grammar concepts. This paper proposes a new definition for the concept of sentence so that it can be used for spoken Spanish analysis. Already existing definitions are evaluated and discarded because they do not fit with many normal speech structures. Besides, they usually are confusing regarding syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic features. We propose a new definition only based on grammar and semantic features. Conclusions show that this approach allows the syntactic analysis of speech in a much more accurate way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will examine three aspects of communicative immediacy in eighteenth century documents from the Diachronic Corpus of Spanish in the Kingdom of Granada (CORDEREGRA): the use of -ico, -illo and -ito, the variation diferiencia/diferencia, osted/usted and defunto/difunto, and the loss of /d/. We want to emphasise three methodological aspects in the study of orality: the importance of a control corpus, the problems that CORDE has for the historical study of colloquial Spanish and the value of the current sociolinguistic data to interpret the history of a language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]