Mala vida : Un estudio semántico

Sammanfattning

This is a study of how the Spanish phrase mala vida is used in a historical corpus, the Corpus diacrónico de la academia Española, and an attempt to find out the meaning of this enigmatic phrase, based upon its patterns of use in this particular context. Furthermore, the study investigates mala vida as an attribute, in a particular serie of phrases that refer to people (hombres de mala vida, mujeres de mala vida, gente de mala vida), in the same corpus, in order to find out whom they refer to. The study finds that mala vida has many different meanings, and handles the relationship between them by distinguishing between primary and secondary meanings (significados básicos and significados secundarios), where every possible semantic nuance of mala vida is an expression of either one of two significados básicos, which is expressed in a semantic scheme, that has the latter ones subordinated to the former. As for the secondary objective, the study finds that the attributive phrases refer to certain social groups, whose common denominator is their social marginalization.