Crossed transposition in a corpus-based study of motion in English and Spanish

Abstract

The present paper reports on a translation-based teaching-oriented study of the expression of path and manner of motion (Talmy 1972) in English and Spanish. The aim is to explore contrastive differences by analysing transla-tions, with special attention to crossed transposition (Molina and Hurtado Albir 2002), which implies a double shift of part-of-speech from the source text to the target text, and is the expected type of transfer between a satel-lite-framed language like English and a verb-framed language like Spanish. Two corpora have been used, a monolingual corpus of Children’s Short Sto-ries, the CSS-corpus, and a parallel corpus English-Spanish, P-ACTRES 2.0. The results show a high tendency for implicitation of either path or manner and for compression in the translations into Spanish, whereas crossed trans-position is preferred in the translations into English. Also, some pedagogical applications are suggested for including these motion expressions in TEFL to young learners through storytelling.