Characterising Verbs in English and Spanish. A Corpus-based Contrastive Study

Abstract

This paper is part of the ACTRES project on contrastive linguistics University of León(Spain), which attempts to establish fuctional-semantic equivalents in English and Spanish in a number of problematic areas. This paper deals with verbal characterisation in English and Spanish and the different semantic functions associated to the syntactic realizations of these fuctions. This is a particularly problematic semantic area in an English-Spanish contrast, and leads to negative interference in translation.In both languages there is a wide range of syntactic means available for characterising verbs, and the meanings may relate to time, place, manner, purpose, etc. This apparent complexity, however, conceals subtle associations between particular meanings and che most fequently used syntactic form to actualise those meanings (Bondarko 1991). Authentic language data corresponding to two sample verbs, make and hacer, have been extracted from monolingual corpora to reveal these associations.