The prototype of the category convenio in the Framework of International Cooperation: Diachronic Analysis

Abstract

This study belongs to the field of cognitive semantics and international cooperation because it seeks to understand the diachronic evolution of the category convenio [agreement] and establish its prototype. Furthermore, this noun, understood as a document, is the primary legal basis for managing all types of aid in its different forms (financial, technological, academic) between industrialized and developing countries, mainly allowing for bilateral cooperation, triangular cooperation and south-south cooperation. This corpus is extracted from the electronic platform of the Real Academia Española, which contains the Diachronic Corpus of Spanish (CORDE) and the Current Spanish Reference Corpus (CREA).
It can be observed in the analysis that the meanings derived from the prototype are considered secondary or subordinate, which shows that there is an implicit agreement accepted by a community that shares the same language and culture. The analysis of the semantic evolution of the term convenio during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries allows us to understand its polysemy both in the past and in the present, where the meaning of acuerdo remains as a prototype in the semantic network of convenio.