ME IMPORTA UN COMINO AND ITS DIATOPIC VARIANTS. A CORPUS-BASED STUDY FROM A CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR APPROACH

This paper aims at demonstrating the usefulness of the constructional approach to explain the phenomenon of diatopic variation in idioms from a cognitive point of view, including at the same time the speakers' creative uses of idioms (e.g. (no) importar a alg. on bledo/tres pepinos/un poroto/un moco/...). Thus, after defining the concept of "constructional idiom" and advocating for it against "idiomatic scheme" in the framework of Construction Grammar (CxG), the goals of this article are, by means of the study of corpus the construction [(no) PRONpERs importar [SN[DETNUMERAL + N-(taboo or low value object)]]: 'not to care at all', the following: (1) Check whether the construction has similar productivity in the Spanish subcorpus of Spain and in the American Spanish subcorpus of Sketch Engine; (2) determine which are the prominent fillers of the substantive slot of the construction in both subcorpora, showing the corresponding similarities and differences.