Cristina Buenafuentes de la Mata

Aportaciones de la semántica cognitiva a la formación de palabras por composición

The aim of this research is to show the application of Cognitive Semantics to the description of nominal compounding in American Spanish. Compounding is a productive morphologic process used to create words with a transparent meaning (apoyacabeza ‘head restraint’, destapabotellas ‘bottle opener’ etc.). However, many compounds also have an important level of idiomaticity (ahogabecerro ‘tree’, bienmesabe ‘candy’ etc.). The paper shows that Cognitive Semantics can explain the semantic opacity of these idiomatic compounds on the basis of metaphoric and metonymic processes. The data are extracted from the Diccionario de americanismos published by the Real Academia Espanola.

Ortografía y morfología flexiva en el Diccionario de la lengua española (2014): el DLE como diccionario de dudas en contraste con otras obras académicas

La investigacion necesaria para llevar a cabo este trabajo ha sido posible gracias a la ayuda de la DIGICYT para los proyectos “Historia interna del Diccionario de la lengua castellana de la Real Academia Espanola en el siglo XIX (1817-1852)” (no. de referencia FFI2014-51904-P) y la “Variacion en la interfaz sintaxis-discurso” (no. de referencia FFI2014-56968-C4-2-P), y al apoyo del Comissionat per Universitats i Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya concedido al “Grupo de Lexicografia y Diacronia” (no. de referencia 2014 SGR1328).

Variación morfosintáctica en los dialectos del español: un análisis desde la diacronía

In this research, we analyze some Spanish grammatical phenomena which, according to the Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española of Real Academia Española (2009), are characteristic of some of its dialects. For instance, the adjectivation of adverbs such as medio and bastante, the combination of un otro, the sí propio ‘sí mismo’ construction, the placement of unstressed personal pronouns, the pronominal use of recordar, and the expression cada que ‘siempre que’. Taking their presence in two corpus (CORDE and CORPES XXI) and the fact that dialectology studies, grammars or linguistic atlas barely pay attention to morphosyntactic variation, this study demonstrates that such grammatical structures are to be considered the result of linguistic change as they do appear in earlier stages of Spanish, with more or less vitality according to period and text typology. Thus, this paper shows that diachronic analyses can provide valuable information on the issue of Spanish dialectal morphosyntactic variation.