CEILE: A Corpus of Free Indirect Style in Spanish—Structure, Development and Practical Application

Abstract

Free indirect style is grammatically defined as a type of discourse typically used in literary texts which combines features of both direct and indirect style. Deictic elements corresponding to the narrator and to the characters overlap in free indirect style, with no specification as to whether the transcribed words refer to the former or the latter. Its unique aspects have caused some specialists to raise controversial issues in terms of characterising this structure. Part of the limitations of previous studies stem from the fact that they have been based on examples taken from specific works and authors, while more objective results could have been obtained if the principles of corpus linguistics had been relied upon, as the methodology allows research hypotheses to be based on meaningful samples of real language. However, the annotation of the existing language corpora for the study of the Spanish language prevents researchers from automatically retrieving samples of free indirect style. In order to bridge this gap, it has been created a specific corpus of free indirect style called CEILE: Corpus de Estilo Indirecto Libre en Español (Corpus of Free Indirect Style in Spanish). CEILE has undergone three stages of development before reaching its current online version. This article describes how it has evolved over time, shows some possible uses and provides initial results obtained from its implementation, which significantly facilitates the analysis of this grammatical structure and its study in contrast to other reported speech procedures.