Los posesivos en A Fala y su combinación con el artículo determinado
The possessives in A Fala language and their combination with the definite article

Summary/Abstract: The possessives in A Fala show similarities with other Romance languages, but they also present interesting peculiarities and differences between the three varieties of A Fala. For this reason, the study first presents the system of possessives and then examines in detail the possibility of using the definite article before prenuclear possessives, taking into account both linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The analysis is based on the A Fala Database, which contains 337,000 words with 1190 uses of the possessives mei(s), miña(s) in the prenuclear position. The database is composed of an oral corpus and a written corpus, which allows the two styles to be analysed separately. The results verify the relevance of the semantic value of the noun. According to this criterion, the nouns can be divided into three groups: those that prefer use without the article, those that favour the use of the article, and a small hesitant group. As regards extralinguistic factors, the influence of the age variable and slight differences between the three varieties of A Fala have been confirmed. The analysis has provided important material for the grammatical description of the language that allows its comparison with other Romance languages. On the other hand, methodological limitations have also been identified. The database does not offer sufficient information on less frequent nouns; moreover, the decision to use or omit the article may depend on other linguistic or extralinguistic factors that have not been the subject of this analysis.

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