La disponibilidad léxica de los estudiantes preuniversitarios valencianosreflexión metodológica, análisis sociolingüístico y aplicaciones.

Abstract

This survey is one more sample of the investigations which are being carried out in different geographical areas of Spain and Latin-America on lexical availability. They are integrated in the panhispanic project whose final objective is to elaborate a dictionary of lexical usage of the Spanish language. The aims of the study are threefold: firstly, it describes the lexical usage of Spanish in the province of Valencia by applying quantitative procedures of lexico-statistics and presents the inventory of available lexis; secondly, according with the quantity and quality assumptions of variationist socio-linguistics, it analyses the co-variation between the different social factors of sex, habitual language, type of school, place of residence, socio-cultural level and the obtained lexical results, which allows us to determine the sociolectal stratification of this community; thirdly, following the orientations of psycholinguistics, it shows the degree of qualitative convergence amongst the conceptual associations which the Spanish-speaking and Catalan-speaking groups establish upon the same stimuli within the sixteen topics. Finally, it must be mentioned as most relevant conclusions that; remarkable differences can globally be observed in the lexical productivity within the different topics; also,that the most discriminating socio-logical variable is the type of school, followed by socio-cultural level and sex; and that the degree of global convergence of nuclear and proto-typical terms in both languages is quite high within the sixteen topics, about 75%.