The Grammatical Category Ratio in Spanish. Stylistic and sociolinguistic features
Authors
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Inmaculada Martínez Martínez
Universidad de Cantabria
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4760-0903
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Hiroto Ueda
Universidad de Tokio
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3204-609X
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Abstract
The Grammatical Category Ratio (GCR) has barely been studied in sociolinguistics, mainly in relation to extralinguistic factors such as sex, age, or educational background. This is probably due to the fact that the GCR shows little sociolinguistic variation: if this is the case, the sociolinguistic constancy of the GCR will indicate the essence of the Spanish language. In this research, we present the analysis of the GCR in interviews conducted in Santander with 54 speakers classified by sex, age, and educational level, corresponding to the PRESEEA project (Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish in Spain and the Americas). We examine the causes of this constancy according to the “System” and “Norm” of language (Coseriu 1973) and the “Law of Large Numbers” of theoretical statistics (Corbalán and Sanz 2011). Within this pattern of usage, we found certain biases toward nouns in men, toward verbs in women, toward adverbs in older people, and toward nouns and adjectives in highly educated people. These biases, which constitute the linguistic norm, are reliable, as the coefficient of variation of the GCR became sufficiently small due to the expanded number of materials.Keywords:
Grammatical category , Grammatical category ratio , Sociolinguistic variation , PRESEEA-Santander corpusReferences
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