Variability in Spanish adjectival position: A corpus analysis

Traditional semanticsyntactic descriptions of adjectival position in Spanish account for the majority of what is considered grammatically possible. However, the source of these data seems to only represent written language and/or internally generated data. It does not seem to account for phenomena related to language use or for the different constraints in production and processing inherent to other registers (File-Muriel 2006). This article looks at the production and processing constraints that oral and written registers feature in the exchange of information. Samples of language that can be placed into two different registers (oral vs. written) are analyzed within a series of parameters of classification drawn from traditional adjectival descriptions (Demonte 1999) and a proposal that assigns phonology a role in adjectival placement (File-Muriel 2006).