Lexical corpus of Colombian Spanish CorlexCo and its application to research on TSFL and TSSL

Abstract

This article presents the Lexical Corpus of Colombian Spanish CorlexCo (https://clicc.caroycuervo.gov.co/corpus/CorlexCo) by Instituto Caro y Cuervo, a tool that compiles lexical combinations with integral criteria, that is, those only used in the country and also those shared with other Latin American countries and with general Spanish. It is not limited to Colombianisms. This is a macro project started in 2019 and developed in successive annual phases. By lexical combinations we refer to all types of pluriverbal units (compound words, collocations, support-verb constructions, idiomatic phrases, paremia and conversational routines). The data comes from five sources: (1) general, scholar, dialectal, phraseological and combinatorial dictionaries, (2) almost two hundred and fifty lexical repertoires of Colombian Spanish, (3) more than one hundred and fifty academic research on the lexicon used in Colombia, (4) linguistic corpus and (5) the domain www.google.com.co. With respect to the application of CorlexCo, on the one hand, it can be used in curricular planning, design of teaching materials and evaluation processes of Spanish as a foreign language and second language (for indigenous and deaf people) and, on the other hand, it can constitute a work reference for learners, teachers, editors, translators and linguists who research on TSFL and TSSL. Section 1 summarizes the current state of dialect lexicography in Colombia. Section 2 describes the main characteristics of CorlexCo, the selection of the type of lexical units for each annual phase, the selection of entries and annotation, and illustrates its use with various types of search. Section 3 shows its application to research on TSFL and TSSL. This corpus is an open resource that is periodically updated and that offers the academic community an expanded description of the Colombian lexicon, compared to dictionaries.