Habla culta de Caracas 1973-2011

Abstract

The term Corpus Reengineering is proposed to refer to the process of reconfiguration of speech samples for reuse in various scopes (Guirado 2014 y 2015). The process was de-veloped with two corpora of Spanish spoken in Caracas, aiming at the construction a spe-cial purpose corpus for diachronic studies: Corpus del habla culta de Caracas 1968-77 (cf. Rosenblat & Bentivoglio 1979) and Corpus sociolingüístico de Caracas PRESEEA 2004-10 (cf. Bentivoglio & Malaver 2014). The methodology included the following steps: i. describe the structuring of the original corpus; ii. evaluate the inoperative and stable aspects of each architecture; and, iii. create the new design and estimate its representative-ness. Such methodology produced a new corpus for the real time study of linguistic phe-nomena in a specific speech community (cultured speakers): Habla culta de Caracas 1973-2011. Corpus diacrónico. It is concluded that Corpus Reengineering is a rewarding prac-tice for Corpus Linguistics that provides useful and interesting products for the linguistic community.