La comparación como elemento fraseológico en la lexicografía hispanolatina del siglo xvii

Abstract

Spanish provides for a great diversity of syntactic constructions to express superlativeness of a predicative content, being stereotypical comparisons one of them very frequently uses, specially in spoken language. As a considerable amount of documents show, the use of this construction can be traced back to very ancient times in history. Only some cases included by Golden Age hispano-latin lexicographers in their dictionaries are explained in this paper. The above mentioned lexicographers record in their thesauri  a lot of comparative structured phraseological entities, most of them commoly used at that time to emphasize the predicative content of a verb or an adjective. These are stereotypical value comparisons that, because very frequently found in spoken and written language, lexicographers thought should be included in a dictionary. Thus, this recording process becomes de beginning of phraseological units codification as fixed expressions, more or less flexible, used by speakers to express superlative value.