“De ceca a meca: usos y variantes de una expresión a la luz de los estudios de corpus”

During the past years corpus-based studies have achieved great importance, especially thanks to the influence of its employment in the English language. Although it is in the linguistic works where the maximum development of its application has been observed, it would be a mistake to minimize the possibilities that its use can offer for the philological and literary analysis. In this paper I intend to call attention on this issue; more precisely I intend to investigate the literary and non-literary uses of the idiom “De (la) Ceca a (la) Meca”, its variants, its modified forms and its meaning; the starting point will be the systematic examination of the CORDE by Real Academia Española, without neglecting other sources.