Property Concepts in Contrast: The Translation of Adjectivals (Spanish-English).

Abstract

The present study explores the relation between the form and function of adjectivals that encode inherent property concepts in English and Spanish, which, contrary to transitory states, are assumed to be expressed by morphologically basic, prototypical adjectives (Dixon 1982). For this purpose, a corpus of Spanish literary texts and their corresponding English translations was compiled and subjected to a qualitative contrastive analysis, focusing on the ways in which Spanish adjectives/participles ending in –do/a are rendered into English. The observed pervasiveness and semantic versatility of the Spanish participial suffix – do/a, as well as the different patterns of meaning-to-form correspondence in adjectivals in the two languages possibly point to a different conceptualization. In turn, this difference in conceptual hierarchy, as reflected on linguistic forms, should have observable implications for the translation of the examined forms into English.