Autors:
Granvik, Anton & Carlos Sánchez LancisTítol:
Digital Humanities serving the history of Spanish: hierarchical clustering analysis for establishing a periodization of the languageEditorial: Routledge
Data de publicació: 31-03-2025
Pàgines: 26
ISBN13: 978-1-003-39377-1
Més informació
In this chapter we approach an old problem found in the history of Spanish, namely its periodisation, from the perspective of digital humanities. We apply hierarchical clustering to three complementary datasets retrieved from online corpora: the Royal Spanish Academy's CORDE (1200–1974), the Oralia (ODE) corpus of inventories and witness statements (1510–1890), and the Post Scriptum (PS) corpus of written correspondence (1510–1833). The data consist of 23 well-known morphosyntactic phenomena from the history of Spanish. These phenomena were chosen because our aim is to establish a periodisation based on purely linguistic data. The results of our analysis confirm many previous observations on the periodisation of Spanish, such as a cutoff point at the beginning of the 16th century. In particular, the comparison of the parallel datasets shows that although the “kind of language” analysed affects the results and offers partly different periods, there are overarching similarities across the three corpora that offer converging evidence for our periodisation of Spanish according to purely linguistic data.
