Linguistic Legos: a Description of Spanish Syntagmatic Compounds in Three Mexican Corpora of Lexical Availability Task.

Abstract

Syntagmatic compounds are a type of morphological compound that contributes to the increase of a
learner’s vocabulary. They are created when two or more lexemes join to form a new word.
Considering they could have wide pedagogic implications due to the multiple combination
possibilities from a single base, this analysis intends to describe the frequency and classification of
syntagmatic compounds as well as their bases in three Mexican corpora of Lexical Availability Task of
students from different times, regions and education levels. It also aims to describe the relationship
between bases and lexical items to examine whether a few of the bases are needed for many of
syntagmatic compounds found in Spanish. Results showed that syntagmatic compound are quite
available (from 10% to 31% of total lexical items). Within the classification of these compounds, the
most common were the prepositional ones. It was also found that only 50 bases are needed to form more than a third of the compounds found in the lexical availability responses. A list of the top 20
bases is presented for its use among the teaching of Spanish as a second language. It is proposed that
since studying a small quantity of words can enable learners to build a great number of compounds,
they could be conceptualized as linguistic legos.