Using “small and tidy” historical corpora to explore linguistic variation in Early Modern Spanish. New possibilities in the paradigm of Digital Humanities

Abstract

This work presents the main characteristics of two specialised historical corpora: the P.S. Post Scriptum corpus, composed of private letters, and the Oralia Diacrónica del Español, which comprises inventories of goods, witness depositions, and medical certificates. In particular, it demonstrates that the decisions made during the various stages of corpus design and compilation render these corpora especially suitable as digital resources for studying linguistic variation in Early Modern Spanish. To this end, three case studies are analysed, addressing phenomena of dialectal variation at different levels of language analysis: laísmo (i.e., the use of la and las as indirect objects) as a morphosyntactic phenomenon, the use of the suffixes -ico and -ito as a morphological phenomenon, and seseo as a phonetic phenomenon. The ultimate aim of this work is to highlight the potential these small and tidy corpora offer for research into historical Spanish linguistics.