Spanish Word Frequency: A Historical Surprise

This article compares the word frequencies of the few most common words in Spanish as revealed by a modern corpus of over five thousand words with a corpus of Golden-Age Spanish texts of over a million words, and finds that although de is by far the most common word in contemporary Spanish, in the 1...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Computers and the humanities Vol. 35; no. 2; pp. 231 - 236
Main Author:	Woods, M. J.
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers 01-05-2001 Kluwer Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:	Comparative analysis Corpus linguistics Electronic documents Historical text analysis History Internet Language history Linguistics Literature Mathematics and linguistics Quantitative studies Spanish language Texts Word frequency Word frequency analysis Words Electronic text Lexical frequency Mathematical linguistics Linguistic change Quantitative study History of language Corpus analysis
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Summary:	This article compares the word frequencies of the few most common words in Spanish as revealed by a modern corpus of over five thousand words with a corpus of Golden-Age Spanish texts of over a million words, and finds that although de is by far the most common word in contemporary Spanish, in the 16th and 17th Centuries it was considerably less frequent, and in many texts was less frequent than y, or que for which shared very similar frequency figures. It is argued that this significant change in the Spanish language comes about in the 20th Century.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0010-4817 1574-020X 1572-8412 1574-0218
DOI:	10.1023/A:1002620720223