Corpora: Re: Spanish synonyms ... (http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/corpus)

[Mark Davies]

Linda (and others),

>My problem is that I would like to show one or two examples in Spanish 
>(besides the Engish ones), but I do not have a corpus in Spanish (and I 
>don't have time to put one together). I was thinking about looking at "tal 
>vez" vs. "quizá" or "desde luego" vs. "por supuesto" and 'hay que vs. 
>tenir que'. If someone could send me, from your corpus, examples of these 
>I would be very grateful. Or if you already have one or two other examples 
>done, this would be fine too.

Feel free to take a look at http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/corpus, which is a 
small three million word sample corpus that shows some of the functionality 
that will be part of the 100 million word corpus of Spanish that I'm 
creating as part of an NEH-funded project.

One of the nice things about this corpus is that for any one of 30,000 
different lemma, you can input the lemma and it will show you all of the 
synonyms in the corpus, and these can be limited by frequency (e.g. all of 
the synonyms of "triunfar" that occur at least 5 times in the 1900s).  You 
can also search by part of speech (35 different categories) as well as by 
lemma (e.g. all forms of a given verb).  In the case of your query, for 
example, you could look for < haber.* que > and it will give you the 
construction in all of the different tenses.

I hope this helps.

Mark Davies

P.S. At present the synonym feature is limited to single words, which would 
present some difficulty for two word units like "tal vez" or "desde 
luego".  The ability to look up such two (or more) word units will be 
added, however, within the next couple of weeks.  For right now, you can 
still of course see the two word units in KWIC display; you just won't be 
able to pull up the synonyms for these units.


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Mark Davies, Associate Professor, Spanish Linguistics
http://mdavies.for.ilstu.edu/
4300 Foreign Languages / Illinois State University / Normal, IL 61790-4300
309-438-7975 (voice) / 309-438-8038 (fax)
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