“POSSIBLE” AND “IMPOSSIBLE” IN THE NATIONAL VARIETIES OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE

“POSSIBLE” AND “IMPOSSIBLE” IN THE NATIONAL VARIETIES OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE

Author:  V.Z. Demyankov

Affiliation:  Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia named after Patrice Lumumba

Abstract:  Lexical items denoting possibility and impossibility are part of the semantic category of “epistemic warrant” (Lyons, 1977). They are used differently in Castilian Spanish (Spain) and Spanish of Latin America. This paper explores how some principles behind artificial intelligence systems are applied in algorithms for processing text corpora in these two varieties of Spanish.
The results include statistical analysis of the left and right contexts of these words and their related terms within representative corpora. The data was further analyzed to demonstrate differences in the concepts of possibility and impossibility between the two varieties. For example, in Castilian Spanish, ‘imposible’ is most frequently used immediately after ‘es’ (3rd person singular form of the verb “to be”) in the present tense, while in Latin American Spanish, it is most frequently used immediately after ‘era’ (3rd person singular of the past tense of “to be”).
In both corpora, as well as in other languages studied in several publications by the author (Latin, English, Russian, French, etc.), lexical items that denote positive possibility quantitatively outnumber those of the impossibility class. However, this predominance is less pronounced in Latin American texts than in the Castilian corpus.
These findings may be useful in identifying different attitudes towards epistemological justifications for statements in different cultural contexts.

Keywords:  cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, contrastive corpus-statistical investigation, possible, context, corpus design, national varieties of Spanish, linguistic identity.

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Acknowledgments:  : The research is financially supported by the Russian Science Foundation, project No. 24–18–00702 at the RUDN University.

For citation:  Demyankov, V. Z. (2024). “Possible” and “impossible” in the national varieties of the Spanish language. Voprosy Kognitivnoy Lingvistiki, 4, 5-14 (In Russ.).

Pages:  5-14