Towards a history of register in Spanish

Abstract

Although the significance of many other dimensions of variation in the data of Spanish historical linguistics is well recognised, the importance of studying variation in register has been underestimated and its feasibility questioned. This is in striking contrast to English historical linguistics, in which the study of register on the basis of electronic corpora is comparatively far advanced. This paper is a small-scale investigation of a 15th-century Spanish text, Arcipreste de Talavera o Corbacho (hereinafter referred to as Corbacho), whose author is clearly making an attempt to represent, perhaps stereotypically, different contemporary registers. It shows how, through a combination of statistical analysis and philological sensitivity, register-based linguistic variables can be recovered from a relatively short, multi-register text.

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