LingüÍstica de Corpus

Anaphoric Encapsulation, Text Information Structure and Discourse Topicality

“…According to previous studies, the ability of the reader to link the AE to the previous text is based on different factors. Here is a short list of some of the most fundamental ones: a) the syntactic and semantic complexity of the antecedent (González, 2008;López Samaniego, 2013); this has a direct consequence on the reader's capability of identifying and delimiting the antecedent due to the fact that, as cognitive approaches have claimed, the antecedent is not only a set of lexical expressions but also the reconstruction of a state of affairs based on the reader's context and encyclopaedia knowledge, a knowledge that is activated by a discourse segment in the co-text preceding the AE (Loureda et al, this volume); 30 b) the type of encapsulator (López Samaniego, 2015;Borreguero Zuloaga, 2018) and thus the complexity of the inferential process necessary to retrieve the antecedent: metaphorical encapsulators are harder to process than 'neutral' ones, because they presuppose both an encyclopaedic knowledge shared with the writer (Conte, 1998) that must be activated and the capacity to recognize the conceptual metaphors underlying their use (Llamas Saíz, 2010b;Pecorari, 2021); the global meaning is thus the result of an inferential process (D 'Addio, 1988), ensuing from the contextual enrichment of a sequence of lexical elements; conversely, nominalizations are easier to process because they have a common lexeme with the main verb of the predication in the antecedent; however, a semantically weak form (general nouns), not providing any significant information, hardly contributes to the identification of the referent (Lala, 2010b;López Samaniego, 2010), and this explains that it could be harder to process than NPs (Loureda et al, this volume); 31 c) the type of anaphoric element (definite article, demonstrative): the instructions about the accessibility of the antecedent vary according to the type of anaphoric element pre-facing the AE (Ariel, 1998;Figueras, 2002); 32 most authors claim that demonstratives are the prototypical pre-modifier in AEs and almost compulsory in the case of metaphorical ones (Conte 1996), as we have seen in section 2.1.; in other words, «the less cognitively accessible the referent, the greater the tendency to use the demonstrative pronoun» (Dam, 2014); the distance between the anaphoric encapsulator and the encapsulated text, because referential distance contributes to promoting a discourse entity to a certain cognitive status (Cowles & Garnham, 2005;Zulaica-Hernández, 2009); the distance should be measured horizontally (the number of clauses between the AE and the antecedent) and vertically (the number of syntactic levels, i.e., embedded clauses, between them); this is strictly related to the number of entities i...…”

¿De qué hablamos cuando divulgamos sobre lingüística? Análisis de un corpus de textos divulgativos y aplicaciones al estudio terminológico de la semántica léxica

“…(Baron 1984: 119) El acercamiento a la CMO supone, como hemos dicho, aproximarse a la lingüística de corpus. Como indican diversos autores (Parodi 2008, Zulaica Hernández 2015, la lingüística de corpus es una metodología de estudio de la lengua y el lenguaje que nos permite trabajar directamente en contextos auténticos con grandes cantidades de texto, asegurando la fiabilidad de los análisis cuantitativos y cualitativos y la comparación posterior con otros trabajos. Este enfoque es, además, de gran utilidad para el análisis de producciones orales y escritas de los hablantes de una lengua, como muestra la variedad de campos de estudio del ámbito de la lingüística que aplican los avances en la lingüística de corpus a sus investigaciones.…”