Mapping Out the Road from Corpus Linguistics to Psycholinguistics

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). Moreover, Parodi argued that corpus linguists should use corpora that are heterogeneous in nature, and that corpus linguistics and discourse psycholinguistics should go hand in hand. In the current paper these claims are taken to heart with an overview of how corpus linguistics and discourse psycholinguistics could be linked, by mapping out their relations with the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis that predicts that language encodes the perceptual information. Built on previous research that shows that word order reveals semantic information that language users can take advantage of, and by showing that the longitude and latitude of cities can be estimated based on the way the city names share the same linguistic context, this paper shows – using examples from the Spanish language and the South American continent – that language creates meaning.