The creation of specific corpora for the historical study of grammar

the case of constructions with the feminine clitic

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the advantages of an approach to historical linguistic data based on the creation of specifically designed corpora. For this, the main limitations of general reference corpora are presented in the first place; particularly of CORDE (RAE) and Corpus del Español (BYU). The limitations are not only presented with regard to the access on their search engines, but also to the availability of texts that are part of said corpora. Secondly, a particular case is utilized, which shows the origin and development of the constructions with the feminine clitic, so as to exemplify the proposal. Next, the mentioned proposal on the approach of data is contrasted to other research that use general corpora. Thus, it is demonstrated that this way of accessing historical linguistic utterances benefits the study of novel grammatical interface processes that deal exclusively with informal, popular, oral, and dialectically peripheral fields.