WEBLESP: CORPUS OF DIGITAL SPECIALISED COMMUNICATION IN SPANISH. DESIGN, COMPILATION AND USE

Abstract

This paper presents WebLesp, an electronic corpus of texts representative of digital specialized communication in Spanish in four fields of knowledge: environmental sciences, law, economics, and medicine. The creation of the corpus is part of a research project aimed at exploring the dynamics of recontextualization of specialized knowledge, with a special focus on popularised communication carried out on the web in order to communicate specialised topics to non-expert audiences. After illustrating the theoretical foundations guiding corpus design, the paper describes corpus architecture, the methods used for its annotation and the tools that allow its online interrogation. In the second part of the article, we propose a series of examples of corpus use through the open Sketch Engine platform: by using the main corpus analysis tools (wordlists, collocations, concordances, keywords), we illustrate how the corpus can be a valuable tool for the study of popularised discourse.