Spanish nominal cryptotype “Container”

Abstract

The paper concerns the issue of identifying and describing the nominal cryptotype ‘Container’ in Spanish. Different types of cryptotype classifiers are considered. The research is focused on the categorization of the emotion of fear in twenty national variants of Modern Spanish and its USA dialect. The study analyzes the collocability of emotive nouns, in particular, miedo and temor in syntactic constructions which serve as classifiers of the nominal cryptotype ‘Res Continens’. Emotive nouns have been included in the cryptotype basing on the corpus data (News on the Web and CREA). According to the corpus study, the emotion of fear in various national variants of the Spanish language is categorized as a type of а container, where people, cities or even countries can be placed. We can keep, store, hide or find something in fear. By analogy with a container, you can take something or someone out of the fear; it can be opened and closed. Overall, the most frequently verbalized in the Hispanosphere are the attributes of finding and placing smth in a container while the attribute of removing smth from a container demonstrates low communicative value in all variants of Spanish. The noun miedo demonstrates a high tendency for collocability with the cryptotype classifiers first of all in the Spanish national variants of Spain and Mexico. Conversely, the noun’s tendency for collocability with the classifiers of cryptotype ‘Container’ is extremely low in the national variants of Salvador, Guatemala and Puerto Rico.