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Cuanto(s) más datos, (tanto) mejor: A corpus-based study of the Spanish comparative correlative construction.
- Source :
- Review of Cognitive Linguistics; 2024, Vol. 22 Issue 1, p204-257, 54p
- Publication Year :
- 2024
-
Abstract
- The Spanish comparative correlative (CC) construction (Cuanto más leo, (tanto) más entiendo) has a complex syntactic structure and complex semantics. The syntactic relationship between its two subclauses has been subject to much debate. This study, the first large-scale (> 3,000 tokens) corpus investigation, explores various aspects and provides evidence for hypotaxis. However, statistical analysis of the data also revealed 'under-the-surface' parataxis. I therefore argue that the construction cannot be classified as either hypotactic or paratactic, but as hypotactic and paratactic to certain degrees, also compared with its counterparts in English and Slovak. I argue that the 'competition' between hypotactic and paratactic encoding can be attributed to the principle of iconicity, that is, the "(partial) motivation of a construction's form by its meaning" (Hoffmann, 2019, p. 12). Finally, I discuss various formal aspects of the Spanish CC construction that have so far gone unnoticed, providing new evidence in the form of corpus data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- SPANISH language
STATISTICS
DATA analysis
COMPARATIVE studies
SEMANTICS
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 18779751
- Volume :
- 22
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Review of Cognitive Linguistics
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 176843986
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00157.hor