Monocentrism vs. pluricentrism in Catalan

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the problem arising from the application of the monocentric versus the pluricentric codification models to language structures in Catalan language and, particularly, in the Valencian territory. Although some examples will be given from spelling, phonetics or morphology, we shall focus on lexis, as it is the area most perceived by speakers, and therefore that most visible to public opinion. The source material comes from historical, and especially from contemporary text corpora, which allows us to make a contrastive – both qualitative and quantitative – study of the use of certain lexical options, of their specialization in more or less formal contexts, and of the positive or negative prejudices they may have caused among users. It is our belief that bearing these factors in mind is very important for the selection of materials in our corpus. We shall now analyze each of the positions that may be observed among Valencian on the model for the Catalan standard.