Chapter 6. Multi-dimentional analysis of an academic corpus in Spanish

Recent studies on Spanish oriented to describe specialised and multi-register corpora have been carried out using diverse corpus methodologies, such as multi-dimensional analysis. This chapter presents two studies based on the written academic PUCV-2006 Corpus of Spanish. Both employ the five dimensions (i.e. Contextual and Interactive Focus, Narrative Focus, Commitment Focus, Modalising Focus, and Informational Focus) identified by Parodi (2005a). Each of these dimensions emerged out of the functional interpretation of co-ocurrent lexicogrammatical features identified through a multi-dimensional and multi-register analysis. In the first study, we calculate linguistic density across the five dimensions that provide a lexicogrammatical description of the nine academic genres that compose the corpora. In the second study, we compare the PUCV-2006 Corpus with four corpora from other different registers. The findings confirm the specialised nature of the genres in the PUCV-2006 Corpus, where both a strong lexicogrammatical compactness of meanings and a regulation emphasis of the degree to which certainty is manifested are strongly expressed.