Retos del estudio sociohistórico del contacto de lenguas a través de un corpus documental. El caso del castellano en contacto con el catalán en Mallorca

Authors

  • Andrés Enrique Arias
Keywords: historical linguistics, language contact, Spanish, Catalan, 18th and 19th centuries, corpus linguistics, verb morphology

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to analyze the problems involved in the socio-historical study of language contact through written documents. To this end I examine the history of the Spanish-Catalan contact in Majorca using Corpus Mallorca (www.corpusmallorca.es), a collection of personal letters and court documents written in Spanish by Majorcan Catalan speakers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The paper uses two phenomena as case studies: first a phonemic phenomenon (the use of tch spelling to represent the phoneme /ʧ/) and then a morphosyntactic one (the distribution of synthetic and periphrastic future). The case studies detect a number of methodological issues that hinder this type of research. The main ones are: the shortage of easy-to-acess Spanish historical texts produced in a bilingual context, and the problems of comparability between data from different corpora, as they contain texts that belong to different time periods and registers.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.
How to Cite
Arias, A. E. (2012). Retos del estudio sociohistórico del contacto de lenguas a través de un corpus documental. El caso del castellano en contacto con el catalán en Mallorca. Journal of Linguistic Research, 15, 23–46. Retrieved from https://revistas.um.es/ril/article/view/164571