The most frequent paremias in the Spanish newspaper El País

Abstract

This paper describes a procedure followed for the identification of the most frequent paremias in modern peninsular Spanish as they appear in texts from the newspaper El País. The firts aims of the study are to provide a detailed account of the procedure followed to compile the shown in this article, as well as to make these data available for scholars and teachers. The corpus for the research comprises two entire years of texts extracted from the newspaper. Details of the procedure followed for the prior selection of candidate paremias via the examination of their frequency of occurrence are provided. Figures are given for the frequency of all the selected paremias in the El País corpus together with a discussion of the main features of the results. The ultimate aim of the research is to explore the possibility of providing a profile for texts from El País and the dimensions that characterise paremias so that empirical comparisons can potentially be established between this and other text types, both on the intralinguistic and interlinguistic dimensions.