Mapping out the road from corpus linguistics to psycholinguistics

Abstract

Parodi (2007) made the case that corpus linguistics ought to more consider the second most common language spoken in the world, Spanish, and better disseminate the research findings on the structure of that language in the lingua franca of the academic world, English, the third most common language spoken. Moreover, Parodi (2007) argued that corpus linguists should use corpora that are heterogenous in nature, and that corpus linguistics and discourse psycholinguistics should go hand in hand. In the current paper, Parodi’s claims are taken to heart with an overview of how corpus linguistics and discourse psycholinguistics can be linked, by discussing the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis that predicts that language encodes the perceptual world. Built on previous research that shows that word order reveals semantic information that language users can use, and by showing that the longitude and latitude of cities can be estimated based on the way the city names are mentioned in text, this paper shows – using Spanish and South America examples – that language creates meaning.