Mulleres na Lexicografía / Women in Lexicography

Carmen Delia Valadez Pérez

Spanish

1944 (Mexico City, Mexico)

Carmen Delia Valadez Pérez was born on the 15th of July 1944 in Mexico City. In 1961 she enrolled herself in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, for its initials in Spanish) to study for a bachelor’s degree in Spanish Literatures where she was student of Antonio Alatorre, Juan M. Lope Blanch, Margit Frenk, Margo Glantz and Luis Rius, among others. Carmen Delia Valadez obtained her bachelor degree with the thesis Perífrasis de infinitivo en la norma culta de la ciudad de México (Periphrasis of Infinitive in the Cultured Norm of Mexico City). During her studies at the UNAM, Juan M. Lope Blanch invited her to collaborate on the Anuario de Letras (Literatures Yearbook). In 1966, Carmen Delia Valadez started her PhD in Linguistics and Hispanic Literature at The College of Mexico (Colmex, for its initials in Spanish) where she attended courses by Eugenio Coșeriu and Antonio Alatorre, whom she considers her mentor. During her PhD at the Colmex she collaborated on the Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica (New Journal of Hispanic Philology) and participated in the Atlas lingüístico de México (Linguistic Atlas of Mexico, ALM for its initials in Spanish) doing interviews in Yucatan and Nuevo Leon states, transcribing them and doing bibliographical sheets. After her PhD, she spent a year at the L’École Pratique des Hautes Études, in Paris where Carmen Delia Valadez attended courses by Roland Barthes and A. J. Greimas. When she returned to Mexico, Carmen Delia Valadez became a professor at the Sonora University where she taught courses in Phonetics, Historical Grammar, Dialectology, General Linguistics, Latin American Literature and Stylistics. In 1973, Carmen Delia Valadez became one of the founders of the emerging Project of the Diccionario del español de México (Dictionary of Mexican Spanish, DEM for its initials in Spanish), where she, as an editor, specialized in the grammar of Mexican Spanish. Some of her most important contributions to the DEM project were the analysis and definitions of function words, the research on the grammatical usage of the Mexican Spanish and the record of its morphological processes. She also reflected upon the lexicographical method of defining common designations of plants and scientific terms used in the common Mexican Spanish. Carmen Delia Valadez took part of the elaboration and publication of the following works of the DEM project: the Diccionario fundamental del español de México (Fundamental Dictionary of Mexican Spanish, 1982); the Diccionario básico del español de México (Basic Dictionary of Mexican Spanish, 1986); the Diccionario del español usual en México (Dictionary of Common Mexican Spanish, 1st ed., 1996, and 2nd revised and enlarged ed., 2009) and the Diccionario del español de México (Dictionary of Mexican Spanish, 2010). Since 2006 together with Luz Fernández Gordillo Carmen Delia Valadez works on the project “Investigación sobre el léxico regional a partir del Atlas Lingüístico de México” (Research on the Regional Lexicon from the Linguistic Atlas of Mexico), which seeks to make available to laypeople the lexicon recorded in the fifth and sixth volumes of the ALM.

As member of the DEM’s Project: Diccionario fundamental del español de México. Mexico: Comisión Nacional para la Defensa del Idioma Español, El Colegio de México y Fondo de Cultura Económica; 1982. Diccionario básico del español de México. Mexico: El Colegio de México; 1986. Glosario de términos de educación abierta y a distancia. Mexico: Secretaría de Educación Pública; 1991. Diccionario del español usual en México. Mexico: El Colegio de México; 1996. Diccionario del español usual en México, 2ª edición corregida y aumentada. Mexico: El Colegio de México; 2002. Diccionario del español de México. 2 vols. Mexico: El Colegio de México; 2010. Individual Publications: Llovizna y mejilla ‘cachete’: una nota léxica a partir del Atlas lingüístico de México, Lingüística Mexicana. Nueva Época 2020; 2 (1): 119-129. Los nahuatlismos en el Diccionario del español de México, Lingüística Mexicana. Nueva Época 2019; 1 (1): 169-182. Del escritorio del Diccionario del español de México, Boletín Editorial 2010, 146, 20-22. Notas sobre variantes ortográficas en el español de México, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 2007, 31 (2): 276-281. El papel de los ejemplos en el Diccionario del Español Usual en México. In: Pérez Pascual, José Ignacio, Córdoba Rodríguez, Félix and Campos Souto, Mar (eds.), América y el diccionario. La Coruña: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de La Coruña; 2006, pp. 153-164.

https://dem.colmex.mx/

Palacios, Niktelol. Valadez, Carmen Delia. In: Cano, Gabriela and Espino Armendáriz, Saúl (Eds.), Diccionario biográfico de mujeres en la historia del Colmex [Unpublished manuscript]. 2023

David Huerta Meza (Adaptation of the article by Niktelol Palacios)

Marta Negro Romero