A todo chancho le toca su Navidad: Estudio de corpus sobre la variación geoparémica en el español actual

Abstract

Although limited, research on paremiological variation constitutes a valuable contribution to achieving a more balanced representation of the various voices within the Hispanophony. An even smaller number of studies have explored the connection between paremiology and corpus linguistics, partly attributable to the structural and semantic complexity of paremias. This work aims to shed light on the advantages of combining these two disciplines. This article is the result of a corpus-based study on geoparemiological variation. We have worked with two lexical variants of a proverb: the first, traditionally considered canonical in the European context; the second, which, according to our findings, has attained the status of reference form on the American continent. After identifying global patterns of dispersion for the lexical variants in question, an interterritorial comparison was conducted on their diffusion and frequency in two macro-varieties of contemporary Spanish: Rioplatense Spanish and European Spanish. This methodological approach to paremiology opens new lines of investigation, providing an enriching perspective on the proverb as a unit of linguistic and cultural analysis. Additionally, this methodology for data consultation and collection is of significant relevance to other fields of knowledge, such as language acquisition and translation, insofar as it enables the identification of functional and translation equivalents across the various geolinguistic varieties of Spanish