Online databases and language change: the case of Spanish dizque

Publisher： Rodopi

ISSN： 0921-5034

Source： Language and Computers, Vol.71, Iss.1, 2009-11, pp. : 7-28

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Abstract

This paper explores the semantics and pragmatic usage of dizque, an adverb used as an evidential strategy in Latin American Spanish (LAS), and charts its development from the 12^th to the 20^th century, concentrating on changes during the Colonial period, comparing data from online databases such as Mark Davies's Corpus del Español (CDE) and the Real Academia's Corpus diacrónico del español (CORDE)/Corpus de referencia del español actual (CREA) to a printed collection of Colonial texts (Company Company, 1994). The paper shows that dizque emerges very early as an impersonal form, which can be construed as an evidential strategy (13^th century), and declines from the 17^th century onwards according to CDE and CORDE, only to be found again in the 20^th century with a different distribution. I also compare the use of dizque to mark disbelief with its later meaning as an evidential marker (17^th century onwards), and show that fluctuations in the use of the form are related both to the evolution of its meaning and to the text type in which it appears. Despite some limitations due to the size or type of documents sampled, I conclude that online databases such as CDE, CORDE, and CREA are invaluable tools to establish trends in language change and to understand diatopic variation.