N + N Constructions in English and their Spanish Translations: Evidence from a Parallel Corpus

Abstract

The English language makes ready use of nouns as modifiers of other nouns: lemon cake, garden party, etc. A wide range of meaning relationships may be associated to these constructions in English, such as content (a lemon cake is a cake that contains lemon or has lemon flavour) or place (a garden party is held in a garden). This variety in meaning leads to a number of possible grammatical resources available in Spanish to communicate these meanings. This paper analyses a number of English N+N constructions found in a real text, and the different options taken by the Spanish translator in each case. The structures were classified according to semantic criteria (Biber et al. 1999) and the Spanish equivalents were extracted for each case in order to determine the underlying semantic patterns in the Spanish translations. The aim is to establish the degree of typicality of certain constructions for particular meanings in Spanish.