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Part of
Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change
Edited by Richard J. Whitt
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 85] 2018
► pp. 261–280

Some methodological issues in the corpus-based study of morphosyntactic variation

The case of Old Spanish possessives

| University of the Balearic Islands

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
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 8 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.85.12enr
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