“POSSIBLE” AND “IMPOSSIBLE” IN THE NATIONAL VARIETIES OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE; [«ВОЗМОЖНОЕ» И «НЕВОЗМОЖНОЕ» В НАЦИОНАЛЬНЫХ ВАРИАНТАХ ИСПАНСКОГО ЯЗЫКА]

Lexical items denoting possibility and impossibility are part of the semantic category of “epistemic warrant” (Lyons, 1977). They are used differently in Castilian Spanish (Spain) and Spanish of Latin America. This paper explores how some principles behind artificial intelligence systems are applied in algorithms for processing text corpora in these two varieties of Spanish. The results include statistical analysis of the left and right contexts of these words and their related terms within representative corpora. The data was further analyzed to demonstrate differences in the concepts of possibility and impossibility between the two varieties. For example, in Castilian Spanish, „imposible‟ is most frequently used immediately after „es‟ (3rd person singular form of the verb “to be”) in the present tense, while in Latin American Spanish, it is most frequently used immediately after „era‟ (3rd person singular of the past tense of “to be”). In both corpora, as well as in other languages studied in several publications by the author (Latin, English, Russian, French, etc.), lexical items that denote positive possibility quantitatively outnumber those of the impossibility class. However, this predominance is less pronounced in Latin American texts than in the Castilian corpus. These findings may be useful in identifying different attitudes towards epistemological justifications for statements in different cultural contexts. © 2024 Tambov State University. All rights reserved.