Negation and lexical morphology across languages: Insights from a trilingual translation corpus
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Bruno Cartoni
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Marie-Aude Lefer
Abstract
This paper proposes an exploratory cross-linguistic bird’s eye-view of negative lexical morphology by examining English, French and Italian negative derivational affixes. More specifically, it aims to uncover the French and Italian equivalents of the English affixes de, dis, in, non, un and less. These include morphological equivalents (i.e. negative prefixes in French and Italian) as well as non-morphological equivalents (i.e. single words devoid of negative affixation, multi-word units or paraphrases). The study relies on a nine-million-word trilingual translation corpus made up of texts from the Europarl corpus and shows that the systematic analysis of translation data makes it possible to identify the major morphological dissimilarities between the three languages investigated. The frequent use of non-morphological translations in French and Italian reflects fundamental differences between the source language (English) and the two target lan-guages (French and Italian), hence pointing to possible translation difficulties. Morphological translations, on the other hand, bring to light cross-linguistic similarities in the use of negative affixes.
© School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 2011
Artikel in diesem Heft
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- On English and German resultative and causative-resultative derived verbs
- Intensifying affixes across Italian and English
- Negation and lexical morphology across languages: Insights from a trilingual translation corpus
- Contrastive word-formation and lexicography: Compound verbs in English and Bulgarian
- Coordinate compounding in English and Spanish
- The similarities and differences of four neglected lexical categories: English [VerN]N and [VingN]N, and French [NVveur]N and [NVant]N units
- English–French contrasts in word-formation. Morphological patterns and stylistic effects
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special issue on contrastive word-formation: Editors’ preface
- Contrastive word-formation today: Retrospect and prospect
- Aspect indicators for deverbal nominals on different syntactic levels
- Adverb formation and modification: English, German and Dutch adverbial morphology in contrast
- On English and German resultative and causative-resultative derived verbs
- Intensifying affixes across Italian and English
- Negation and lexical morphology across languages: Insights from a trilingual translation corpus
- Contrastive word-formation and lexicography: Compound verbs in English and Bulgarian
- Coordinate compounding in English and Spanish
- The similarities and differences of four neglected lexical categories: English [VerN]N and [VingN]N, and French [NVveur]N and [NVant]N units
- English–French contrasts in word-formation. Morphological patterns and stylistic effects
