Corpus-Based contrastive analysis of English adjectives in Spanish translations: a typological issue

Abstract

In this paper I will provide a detailed analysis of some of the most frequent adjectives in English and Spanish, with reference in particular to their position in the noun phrase. The working hypothesis is that there will be a strong trend to locate adjectives in Spanish translations in pre-modifying positions more often than if these same adjectives occurred in original Spanish texts. The empirical material used for this analysis will be extracted from the English-Spanish parallel corpus known as P-ACTRES compiled at the University of León, Spain. This corpus contains 2.5 million words of contemporary English texts and their corresponding Spanish translations. A variety of registers are represented: fiction, non-fiction, press, etc. The CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual), a large reference corpus of Spanish, will be used for the comparison with original Spanish texts.