Putting meanings into words: English-Ly adverb in Spanish tanslation

Abstract

Traditionally -ly adverbs in English have been associated to the expression of manner, but this suffix is also attached to lexical items that actualise a wide range of other meanings. In Spanish, the formal equivalents of -ly adverbs are adverbs ending in -mente. However, these differ from their English counterparts in various aspects, such as frequency of occurrence and pragmatic use. An English-Spanish parallel corpus of contemporary written texts (ACTRES Project corpus) will be used to identify the different translation possibilities adopted to transfer the semantic functions that may be conveyed by -ly adverbs. The aim is to establish an inventory of translation solutions and unveil possible regularities between formal resource(s) and meaning function(s) in these translated uses.