Semántica insular: corpus y archipiélagos léxicos

By examining the occurrences of a lexical item in a representative corpus it is possible to delineate the mental model of the underlying concept shared by an epistemic community (Van Dijk 2016). This socio-cognitive study uses the tools offered by the Sketch Engine platform to describe the collocational patterns of the Spanish term isla and its Italian equivalent isola in two large corpora. The analysis of the semantic preferences and the perceived semantic prosody suggests an insular narrative, highly shared in both languages, in which the island is represented with laudatory overtones, as a desirable space marked by the beauty and suggestion and, at the same time, by vulnerability.