Volume 47, Issue 4 - Special Issue: ON CONTRASTIVE WORD-FORMATION Editors: Jesús Fernández-Domínguez, Marie-Aude Lefer, Vincent Renner

This paper proposes an exploratory bird’s-eye view of contrastive word-formation research, an area which, to date, remains largely under-researched in the three fields in which it partakes, namely morphology, contrastive linguistics and lexicology. Studies in contrastive word-formation, as well as their meta-analysis in terms of scope, objectives and data, are presented in a critical survey of the literature, together with an extensive bibliography (1960–2010). A new contrastive methodology for future research is looked into and the major practical applications of contrastive word-formation in bilingual lexicography and translator training, among others, are overviewed. Contrastive word-formation, it is argued, should be set within a more rigorous theoretical and methodological framework, which would be characterised by a dynamic conception of the tertium comparationis and the use of empirical data drawn from multilingual corpora.

Recent literature on deverbal nominalisations has focused on the aspectual differences between nominal events expressed by the derivational morphology of the noun as well as the problems regarding their interpretation in natural language examples extracted from text corpora (Ehrich and Rapp 2000; Borer 2005; Spranger and Heid 2007; Alexiadou et al. 2009; Heinold 2010). It seems that the close syntactic environment of such event-NPs (like modifiers or embedding verbal constructions) are quite reliable as indicators for their aspectual properties. It is, however, uncertain in how far such contexts as well as the tense and aspect of the sentence interact with the aspectual information within the nominals themselves. This paper shortly introduces the lexical and morphological units in NPs and VPs which carry aspectual information. I present English, German and French data which show that in sentences where nominal and verbal event information interact different levels of aspect have to be kept apart in order to do justice to the subtle semantic differences of complex event situations.

In this paper I propose a framework for a contrastive investigation of English, German and Dutch adverbial suffixes. According to the morphological literature, these three genetically related languages have an inventory of suffixes for the creation of adverbs. However, only English has a systematic process of adverb formation (namely, with the suffix -ly ) whereas German and Dutch lack such regularity. Any attempt at investigating German and Dutch adverbs and adverb formation more closely has to deal with problematic formal class distinctions. In this paper I aim to show that a function-based approach sheds new light on the notion of adverbial morphology and that the traditional conception of “adverbial suffixes” as morphemes for adverb formation may need to be fine-tuned. As such, a contrastive study of English, German and Dutch adverbial morphology from a functional perspective can contribute to a greater understanding of the more general issue of the demarcation of a class of adverbs.

This study is based on two related semantic patterns as tertia comparationis called “resultative” and “causative-resultative”. It aims to provide answers to two guiding questions: what commonalities and differences between English and German can be identified in the way (causative-)resultativity is morphologically expressed in derived verbs? How can differences be explained in a way that relates to more general characteristics of the two languages? Examples of relevant verbs include enable , fossilise , narrow , solidify , scrap , tighten and beruhigen , erblinden , kristallisieren , personifizieren , spitzen , versteinern . One set of differences that emerges from the descriptive part as particularly striking and is consequently focused on concerns the number of verbs that have (a) only the resultative meaning; (b) only the causative-resultative meaning; and (c) both meanings: there are significantly more derived (causative-)resultative verbs that express only resultativity in German than in English. Most of the English verbs express both resultativity and causative-resultativity; none expresses resultativity to the exclusion of causative-resultativity.

This paper concentrates on the (dis-)similarities in meaning and uses of intensifying affixes across Italian and English nouns and adjectives adopting an integrated approach that brings together research on intensifiers (Paradis 2008), on intensifying and evaluative morphology in Italian and other languages (Grandi 2002; Montermini 2008) and on the morphopragmatics of Italian and other languages (Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994). Specifically, we carried out a qualitative investigation into (partly) comparable corpora so as to have a means to support or revisit statements from encyclopaedic monolingual dictionaries which are typically used for categorial comparison in morphology (e.g. GRADIT, for Italian), as well as statements and current descriptions from the literature. As will be seen, this shall enable us to concentrate on the multiple dimensions along which intensifying affixes may differ or overlap both intra- and cross-linguistically, with special attention to quantity, degree, ±boundedness, the semantic shift from quantity to degree, and the interaction between semantic (degree) and pragmatic intensification.

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.

The paper is focused on a contrastive word-formation analysis of compound verbs in English and Bulgarian. A secondary focus is the possibility of a fruitful cross-pollination between practical lexicography and contrastive studies in the area of verb compounding. The analysis is cast in the cognitive linguistic paradigm and makes use of the concept of the construction schema as the chosen “tertium comparationis”, which best reveals the significant word-formation niches in the two languages under investigation. On the basis of immediate lexicographical experience in bilingual dictionary compilation and by applying the achievements of cognitive studies and contrastive word-formation, several word-formation families are analyzed and the conclusion is drawn that the productivity of compounding in Bulgarian is still significantly lower than that in English. Despite this marked difference in productivity, in the area of verbal compounding the convergence tendencies outweigh the observed contrasts between the two languages.

Coordinate compounding is a process which has been only sporadically considered in word-formation studies on Germanic and Romance languages. In this paper, we compare the situation in English with that in Spanish as far as formal structure and semantics are concerned. To this end, an operational definition of coordinate compounding is first provided, after which a semantic classification of coordinate compounds is developed. For each type, variants are discussed, representative examples are provided, and similarities and dissimilarities between the two languages are highlighted. We finish by raising the issues of recursiveness and productivity in coordinate compounding and we examine the possibilities of expansion and profitability of the different patterns. Our analysis reveals marked similarities between English and Spanish coordinate compounding at various levels, hinting at the possible existence of a cross-linguistic set of common core features in the class of coordinate compounds in both Germanic and Romance.

Two categories of English lexical units, [V er N] N ( howler monkey ) and “subjective” (i.e. including a subject–verb relation) [V ing N] N ( revolving door ), and two French ones, [NV eur ] N ( singe hurleur ) and [NV ant ] N ( porte tournante ) are examined as a group with regard to their similarities. Beside the fact that they have been largely ignored by previous research, they are all endocentric units with a nominal head and a deverbal modifier, in which the head noun is interpretable as the subject of the verb underlying the modifier. In addition, the suffixes are in 2 × 2 correspondence between the two languages. The characteristics of each of the four categories are reviewed, including non-prototypical members, stress when applicable, and the variety of semantic roles underlying the subjective relation. The semantic differences between the two categories in each language are investigated. The final section contains a discussion of the grammatical (morpholog-ical or syntactic) status of the categories.

Starting from the observation that word-formation has received renewed attention in linguistics but remains marginal in the field of contrastive linguistics, the aim of this article is twofold: (a) to provide an overview and a reassessment of outstanding contrasts between English and French in lexical morphology: the productivity of compounding and conversion in English; the existence of and the constraints on conversion in French; the place of Romance and neo-classical compounds; the development of N+N compounds in contemporary French; (b) to show that basic morpho-syntactic differences in lexical structure are ultimately responsible for some of the semantic and stylistic effects observed in translation studies, with special attention to the link between compounds and metonymy in English and their translatability into French.