Modifying nouns: an english-spanish corpus-based contrast of three word pairs

Abstract

The modification of nouns is a problematic area in contrasting English and Spanish. The different typologies to which these two languages belong determine essential differences, such as the unmarked position of adjectives, before nouns in English and after nouns in Spanish. The aim of this study is to set up a list of the most common characterizing resources for nouns in both languages, and establish their different distribution, so that trends in usage can be detected. A number of concordances of three word pairs have been selected from two large monolingual corpora, Cobuild and CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual). The data have been analysed to describe the type of modifiers that occur in both languages. This contrastive analysis provides useful data in areas such as translation, foreign language learning and teaching, or descriptive linguistics. The translation process between English and Spanish is the main focus of this paper.