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Les variations diatopiques dans les expressions figées
Sous la direction de Pedro Mogorrón Huerta, Aude Grezka et Lucía Navarro-Brotons
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes 43:2] 2020
► pp. 317–337

The use of hypocorisms and last names as a stand in for proper names

Distributional differences between English and Spanish

| Universidad de las Américas Puebla

The concern about what constitutes a proper name and its components has produced scientific articles in diverse fields from linguistics, to education, to sociology, to medicine. There is also abundant research about the presence of proper names in the repertoire of multiword expressions (MWEs) in different languages. However, there is an absence of studies in the literature that look at the use of a proper name as an MWE where a hypocorism takes the place of the original first name. This study addresses the MWE hypocorism + last name from a comparative perspective and explores its distributional patterns between American English and Mexican Spanish. A statistical analysis reveals that although this type of MWE is present in both languages, the distributional differences between them imply different usage connotations that should be taken into account when communicating in these languages.

Keywords: hypocorisms, comparative phraseology, proper names, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.A wide-ranging concern about proper name definition
  • 2.Hypocorism formation
  • 3.Proper names in phraseological studies
  • 4.Materials and methods
    • 4.1Rationale and hypotheses
    • 4.2Data collection
  • 5.Distribuitonal patterns and statistical analysis
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 23 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00052.ric
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