Semantic Analysis from a Relational SQL Database: A Practical Example

Abstract

The PhD project La imaginería en la poesía erótica de los Siglos de Oro (Imagery in the erotic poetry of Golden Age) was focused on the analysis of the vocabulary of more than five hundred Spanish sexual poems from the 16th and 17th centuries. With more than 1,150 words annotated throughout the study, the writing of the work required the development of a digital SQL relational database methodology to organise and retrieve the information in an orderly structure. The purpose of this contribution is to describe in detail its creation, its structure, and its practical application in research, apart from demonstrate that SQL relational databases can be a suitable tool for the lexical-semantic analysis of literary texts. To sum up, this work aims to offer other researchers some theoretical basis for the development of similar projects in terms of theory or methodology.