This paper presents a study that aims at identifying the frequency and typology of Spanish phraseological units (PUs) used in spontaneous informal language production. For this kind of study, it is necessary to have access to spontaneous, free-spoken conversations. The source of the PUs for this research is formed by conversations extracted from Gran Hermano, the Spanish version of Big Brother. In this study data obtained from the analysis of almost two hours of spontaneous conversations extracted from Gran Hermano 16 (broadcast live 24/7 via on-line streaming) will be presented and discussed. Moreover, it is intended to open up for discussion whether this reality show can be a better source of spontaneous informal conversations than the existing Spanish oral corpora

Gutiérrez Rubio, Enrique

English

Phrasis - Rivista di studi fraseologici e paremiologici

246 Phrasis Dicembre 2019 Abstract: This paper presents a study that aims at identifying the fre-quency and typology of Spanish phraseological units (PUs) used in spontaneous informal language production. For this kind of study, it is necessary to have access to sponta-neous, free-spoken conversations. The source of the PUs for this research is formed by conversa-tions extracted from Gran Hermano, the Spanish version of Big Brother. In this study data obtained from the analysis of almost two hours of sponta-neous conversations extracted from Gran Herma-no 16 (broadcast live 24/7 via on-line streaming) will be presented and discussed. Moreover, it is intended to open up for discussion whether this reality show can be a better source of spon-taneous informal conversations than the existing Spanish oral corpora1. Keywords: spontaneous informal lan-guage, frequency of Spanish phraseology, typology of Spanish phraseology, Gran Herman1 See http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html (consul-ted 13.11.2019).Typologies of phraseological units and their frequencyin the reality show Gran HermanoEnrique Gutiérrez RubioUNIVERSITY PALACKÝ OLOMOUC (CZECH REPUBLIC) 1. Introduction2 This paper aims to shed some light on the frequency and typology of Spanish phraseology as it is used in spontaneous informal language production. For this kind of analysis, it is neces-sary to have access to spontaneous, free-spoken conversations. Since such linguistic material can-not be found in radio or TV programmes, where the speakers tend to use the standard language, the source of the PUs analysed in this research is Gran Hermano, the Spanish version of the TV show Big Brother. A secondary aim is to test the hypothesis that this reality show could be a bet-ter source of spontaneous conversations than the existing Spanish oral corpora (this topic will be discussed in more detail in Section 2.3).  In this sense, although some of the oral corpora of Spanish are unquestionably large, they are not sufficiently reliable for the purposes of this research study. The best-known Spanish oral corpus is the oral version of the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) composed by Real Academia de la Lengua Española. The 2 I would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the Ministry of Educa-tion, Youth, and Sports of the Czech Republic to the Palacký University Olomouc (IGA_FF_2019_029). I would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Phrasis for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.  Phrasis Dicembre 2019 247most recent edition of this present-day Spanish language corpus, CREA oral 3.23, gathers almost nine million words. Nevertheless, it consists of all kinds of oral linguistic material from more than 1600 sources including, among others, polit-ical speeches, phone conversations, messages on answering machines, and informal dialogues4. Because of the lack of consistency of this Spanish oral corpus, for the research study presented in this paper, I have opted for linguistic data with more consistency. As mentioned above, conver-sations from radio or TV programmes are one of the potential sources available to us. How-ever, this sort of oral data is far from fulfilling the main colloquialiser features proposed by Briz Gómez (2010: 126), i.e. a relationship of equality, experience-based correlation, an everyday inter-action frame, and quotidian topics. On the con-trary, it is reasonable to admit that these features are ideally fulfilled by the contestants of the re-ality show Gran Hermano because of the shared situation of the captives in the house. Another ad-vantage of this methodological approach is that, unlike many oral corpora, such as CREA oral, all the speakers are recorded under identical cir-cumstances. In this sense, when the pros and cons of Gran Hermano as a source of oral linguistic mate-rial are considered, it must be admitted that it is a reality show and that, logically, it merely sim-ulates situations. In consequence, the conversa-tions cannot be evaluated as 100% authentic lin-guistic material. Nevertheless, there are authors, mainly researchers working from a sociological perspective, who claim that these shows pro-duce effects that are more real than one might 3  See http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html (con-sulted 13.11.2019). 4  See http://www.rae.es/recursos/banco-de-da-tos/crea-oral (consulted 13.11.2019). think. In this vein, Dovey (2004: 233) states that, as a material practice, this kind of simulation « [...] produces real knowledge about real things in the real world and has real effects upon real lives ». However, these opinions are not enough to confirm the validity of these conversations as a reliable source of spontaneous informal lan-guage production, a topic that will be discussed in more detail in Section 2.3. In this study, the data obtained from Gran Hermano will be compared with the phraseolog-ical units (PUs) extracted by Penadés Martínez from the PRESEEA ALCALÁ oral corpus5. This corpus consists of eighteen conversations and sixteen interviews in Alcalá de Henares (Ma-drid). The recordings lasted nearly 45-60 minutes and the corpus consists of approximately twen-ty-seven hours’ worth of material and 322000 words (see Penadés Martínez, 2004). Despite all the efforts made, she admits that this oral corpus cannot be considered colloquial, but that it varies between formal and semiformal registers. Inter-estingly, Penadés Martínez (2004) confirms that the degree of formality showed a clear decreasing tendency in the last minutes of the recordings; occasionally, it decreased to the extent that some speakers admitted that they even forgot that they were being recorded at all, although during the interviews and talks the recorder was always in sight. In the case of Gran Hermano, the conversa-tions that were examined took place on the 67th and 76th days of the programme, i.e. at a time when the participants had been monitored and broadcast live 24/7 for more than 1500 hours. Consequently, if after just a few dozen minutes the speakers involved in PRESEEA ALCALÁ oral corpus tended to use a more colloquial reg-ister, it can be proposed that the contestants of 5  See http://preseea.linguas.net/Corpus.aspx (consulted 13.11.2019). 248 Phrasis Dicembre 2019 Gran Hermano could behave linguistically almost as if they were not being recorded, at least af-ter having lived together for weeks in conditions that were highly conducive to colloquialisation. In other words, they could be making use of spon-taneous informal language production.2. Methodology of the analysis For this pilot study, 112 minutes of the reality contest Gran Hermano, broadcast in Spain by the private television station Tele 5, were an-alysed. These almost two hours of programming belonged to the 67th (85 minutes) and 76th (27 minutes) days of the sixteenth season, which was broadcast live 24/7 via online streaming between September and December 2015. From the original eighteen contestants, four women (Marta, Niedziela, Marina, and Sofía) and six men (Carlos, Aritz, Suso, Han, Ricky, and Vera) remained in the house at that moment. Their ages varied between 19 and 28 and their average age was 22.9 years; their socio-economic status ranged from middle- to upper-middle-class, as illustrated by the fact that three of the Gran Her-mano contestants (Han, Sofía, and Marta) were pursuing higher education at the time they par-ticipated in the show. While eight participants were originally Spanish, two were born abroad. Han comes from China, but he moved (together with his mother) to Armilla (Granada) when he was 12 years old6. He is not a native speaker of Spanish, but in 2015, when he participated in the TV competition, he was very fluent in Spanish and studied Electrical Engineering at the Univer-sidad de Granada7. Moreover, Daniel Vera was 6  See https://www.lecturas.com/actualidad/desvelamos-el-duro-pasado-de-han_17606 (consul-ted 13.11.2019). 7  See http://vertele.eldiario.es/verteletv/actua-lidad/concursantes-Gran-Hermano_0_1720327956.html (consulted 13.11.2019). born in Argentina and, unlike Han, he is a na-tive speaker of Spanish–at the time of the show he had already been living in Spain (specifically Gran Canaria) for sixteen years and had a strong Canarian Spanish accent. The fragments were randomly recorded from the 24/7 online streaming channel and sub-sequently analysed, i.e. the videos were viewed several times and all the idioms, routine formu-lae, and proverbs (see section 2.2 for further dis-cussion on these three concepts) from the con-versations that were monitored were excerpted. 2.1 Frequency distributionOne of the aims of this research on phraseol-ogy as it is used in natural communicative sit-uations is to reveal the frequency of the use of PUs. In total, 536 occurrences and 259 types were documented in these 112 minutes of linguistic material. Logically, some PUs appear more than once in the conversations. To be precise, 173 PUs are documented once, 38 PUs twice, seventeen PUs three times, eight PUs four times, six PUs five times, and so on. The PU Es que is the most frequent expression, since it is documented for-ty times, followed by the PU O sea, with twen-ty-nine occurrences. Besides, since 9565 words are documented during the 112 minutes that were analysed, on average one different type is used every 36.9 words and one occurrence every 17.8 words. Since no previous studies had inves-tigated this particular question, it is not possible to evaluate whether these frequencies are high or low. However, in the near future a similar anal-ysis will be performed regarding the frequency of phraseology in two kinds of language pro-duction – in spontaneous formal language pro-duction (oral corpus of the present-day Spanish Phrasis Dicembre 2019 249language CREA oral 3.28) and in spontaneous in-formal language production (Val.Es.Co. corpus9, a compilation of 43 secretly recorded conversa-tions10).2.2 Typology One of the main methodological diffi-culties faced by phraseologists is that it is rather exceptional to find two specialists who use the same typology and the same terminology. Af-ter the evaluation of many existing taxonomies, three basic categories of PUs are proposed for this research.1. Idioms (locuciones in Spanish) such as Tomar-le el pelo a alguien [make a fool of someone] are frequently considered the most salient type of PUs. Although the boundaries of this group are not absolutely defined, in the sense proposed in this research, an idiom would be a unit « [...] that is fixed and semantically opaque or metaphori-cal, or, traditionally, “not the sum of its parts”, for example, kick the bucket or spill the beans » (Moon, 1998: 4). 2. Routine formulae (fórmulas oracionales in Spanish) are a heterogeneous group of multi-word expressions frequently used for pragmatic purposes–independent speech acts expressing a complete thought–such as Spanish ¿Sabes lo que te quiero decir? [You know what I mean?]. 3. Proverbs (paremias in Spanish) are indepen-dent maxims with a deontic function such as 8  See http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html (con-sulted 13.11.2019). 9  See http://www.valesco.es/?q=corpus (con-sulted 13.11.2019).10  See http://www.valesco.es/ (consulted 13.11.2019). Spanish A quien madruga, dios le ayuda [the early bird catches the worm].The results of the typological analysis of the PUs registered in the recordings of Gran Herma-no are presented in Table 1. As can be observed in Table 1, the presence of the type idioms is clearly dominant among the PUs that were documented. Nevertheless, the most relevant data seems to be the very low fre-quency of proverbs. Moreover, the relatively high number of occurrences in the case of routine for-mulae, with around a third of all instances, seems to indicate that a frequent use of this type of PU is a distinctive feature of conversations in spon-taneous informal language production. 2.3 Gran Hermano as a reliable source of sponta-neous informal language One of the aims of this research study was to identify the extent to which this reality show can or cannot be considered a source of natural spontaneous informal language production. To shed some light on this issue, the data extracted from Gran Hermano was confronted with the PUs documented by Penadés Martínez (2004) in her own study based on the PRESEEA oral corpus. Since, in her paper, this Spanish linguist does not provide us with all the documented PUs, but Type Occurrences % Types %Idioms 370 (69.0%) 164 (63.3%)Rout ine formulae165 (30.8%) 94 (36.3%)Proverbs 1 (0.2%) 1 (0.4%)Total 536 (100%) 259 (100%)Table 1: Typology of Spanish PUs250 Phrasis Dicembre 2019 only with a list of verbal phrases (luciones verbales in Spanish), only this specific subtype of idioms will be evaluated. From all the verbal phrases ex-cerpted from Penadés Martínez’ work, 147 types (with 496 occurrences) are registered in Diccio-nario fraseológico documentado del español actual: locuciones ymodismos españoles (DFDEA) by Seco et al. (2004), the most complete, extensive, and up-to-date of the Spanish phraseological dictio-naries published so far. On the other hand, from the forty-four verbal phrases extracted from our recordings of Gran Hermano, thirty-one (with fif-ty-three occurrences) are registered in DFDEA. In Table 2, the stylistic labels proposed for the excerpted PUs by Seco et al. (2004) in their dictio-nary are presented. So, the PUs extracted from Gran Herma-no are labelled colloquial and especially vulgar11 more frequently than those PUs from the PRE-SEEA oral corpus (in this sense, it is important to note that all the vulgar PUs are also considered colloquial). As a result of the important differ-ences regarding the size of both corpora in ques-tion, for the purposes of this study it seems more appropriate to compare occurrences than types. According to this, in Gran Hermano PUs are la-11  In Penadés Martínez (2004) work, just one vulgar PU out of 496 occurrences was documented: tocar los huevos. Corpus Colloquial (vulgar) NeutralPenadés MartínezTypes 43.6% (0.7%) 56.4%Occurrences 18.1% (0.2%) 81.9%Gran HermanoTypes 48.4% (9.7%) 51.6%Occurrences 37.7% (5.6%) 62.3%belled colloquial 2.1 times more frequently and labelled vulgar 28 times more frequently than those obtained from Penadés Martínez’ study. This data clearly shows that the speakers of Gran Hermano use a much more colloquial register than those who participated in the conversations and interviews analysed by Penadés Martínez. Accordingly, it can be stated that Gran Hermano is a better source of spontaneous conversations than (at least some of) the existing Spanish oral corpora.3. Conclusion The study presented in this paper is just a first attempt to investigate some key aspects of Spanish phraseology as it is used in spontaneous, free-spoken conversations. Specifically, an anal-ysis of 112 minutes of conversations among ten contestants (four women and six men) of the six-teenth season (September-December 2015) of the reality show Gran Hermano, the Spanish version of Big Brother.Table 2: Stylistic registers in DFDEAPhrasis Dicembre 2019 251 Although we are dealing here with a pi-lot study, some promising conclusions regarding the real use of phraseology in spontaneous infor-mal language production can be drawn:I. A huge difference in terms of the frequen-cy of use among the PUs that were doc-umented has been revealed. Whilst most of them (67% of the total) are documented just once, the routine formulae Es que (an expression that could be translated into English as the thing is..., well..., or even it’s just that...) is employed forty times in less than two hours of conversations.II. Moreover, on average one occurrence of a PU is used every 17.8 words. However, because of the lack of previous studies investigating this issue, whether this fre-quency is high or low cannot be evaluat-ed.III. The typological analysis presented in this paper shows that idioms are the most fre-quent type of PUs, followed by routine formulae, a type with a relatively high number of occurrences, probably because they are a distinctive feature of the phrase-ology used in spontaneous informal lan-guage production. Proverbs, with just one occurrence out of 536 PUs, are clearly rare in this register.IV. In Gran Hermano PUs are labelled colloqui-al 2.1 times more frequently and labelled vulgar 28 times more frequently than those PUs included in the oral corpus an-alysed by Penadés Martínez. According to this data, it can be stated that this reality show is a reliable source of spontaneous informal conversations. Although far more data must be analysed in the future, the results obtained from this pilot study provide some relevant clues about the na-ture of Spanish PUs used in spontaneous infor-mal language production.ReferencesBRIZ GÓMEZ, Antonio (2010), “Lo coloquial y lo formal, el eje de la variedad lingüística”, in Castañer Martín, RosaM. / Lagüéns Gracia, Vicente (ed.), De moneda nunca usada: Estudios dedicados a José Mª Enguita Utrilla, Zaragoza, Institución Fernando el Católico, 125-133.DOVEY, Jon (2004), “It’s only a game show: Big Brother and the theatre of spontaneity”, in Mathijs, Ernest / Jones, Janet (eds.), Big Brother International: Formats, Critics and Publics, Lon-don / New York, Wallflower, 232-248.MOON, Rosamund (1998), Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English. A Corpus-Based Approach, Oxford, Clarendon Press.PENADÉS MARTÍNEZ, Inmaculada (2004), “¿Caracterizan las locuciones el registro co-loquial?”, in Villayandre Llamazares, Milka (ed.), Actas del V Congreso de Lingüística Gen-eral, León, 5-8 de marzo de 2002, III, Madrid, Arco/Libros, 2225-2235. SECO, Manuel et al. (2006), Diccionario fraseológi-co documentado del español actual: locuciones y modismos españoles (= DFDEA), Madrid, Agu-ilar.CorpusCorpus CREA RAE, http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html (consulted 13.11.2019). 252 Phrasis Dicembre 2019 Corpus ORAL RAE, http://www.rae.es/recur-sos/banco-de-datos/crea-oral (consulted 13.11.2019). Corpus PRESEEA, http://preseea.linguas.net/Corpus.aspx (consulted 13.11.2019).Corpus VALESCO, http://www.valesco.es/ (con-sulted 13.11.2019).Han Gran Hermano El Diario, http://vertele.eldiario.es/verteletv/actualidad/concur-santes-Gran-Hermano_0_1720327956.html (consulted 13.11.2019).Han Gran Hermano Lecturas, https://www.lectu-ras.com/actualidad/desvelamos-el-duro-pas-ado-de-han_17606 (consulted 13.11.2019). Bio-bibliographic profileEnrique Gutiérrez Rubio completed his PhD in Diachronic Czech Linguistics in 2007, at Uni-versidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). He has been Assistant Professor at the Department of Romance Languages (Faculty of Arts) of Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic) since 2008. He has published four books and over thirty peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, mainly on Spanish and Czech morphology and phraseology. E-mail: enrique.gutierrez@upol.cz

Typologies of phraseological units and their frequencyin the reality show Gran Hermano

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Typologies of phraseological units and their frequencyin the reality show Gran Hermano

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