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Volume 22, Issue 1
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Abstract

Abstract

The Spanish comparative correlative (CC) construction (, () ) has a complex syntactic structure and complex semantics. The syntactic relationship between its two subclauses has been subject to much debate. This study, the first large-scale (> 3,000 tokens) corpus investigation, explores various aspects and provides evidence for hypotaxis. However, statistical analysis of the data also revealed ‘under-the-surface’ parataxis. I therefore argue that the construction cannot be classified as either hypotactic or paratactic, but as hypotactic and paratactic to certain degrees, also compared with its counterparts in English and Slovak. I argue that the ‘competition’ between hypotactic and paratactic encoding can be attributed to the principle of iconicity, that is, the “(partial) motivation of a construction’s form by its meaning” (Hoffmann, 2019, p. 12). Finally, I discuss various formal aspects of the Spanish CC construction that have so far gone unnoticed, providing new evidence in the form of corpus data.

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2023-06-27
2025-06-18

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Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association 22, 204 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00157.hor
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): comparative correlative; corpus data; covarying-collexeme analysis; hypotaxis; parataxis; principle of iconicity; Spanish

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