¿Qué significa un adjetivo? Estudio contrastivo inglés-español de la caracterización nominal.

Abstract

This paper is a corpus-based contrastive study involving English and Spanish as the two working languages. The contrast focuses on the semantic function ofnominal characterization in attributive position. This is an area where there are major differences in cross-linguistic analyses between these two languages, often leading to problems in translations from English into Spanish. There is a wide range of grammatical resources that may modify nouns in both languages. However, the most common types of modifiers (adjectives, relative clauses, nouns, prepositi¿nal phrases) show a different distribution across meaning boundaries in English and Spanish. In this paper we have used data extracted from two large monolingual reference corpora Cobuild and CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Espai of Actual) to establish the meanings most commonly associated to the different grammatical resources used for modifying nouns attributively. The results for English and Spanish are contrasted and clearly illustrate the divergences existing in the structuring of nominal characterization in both languages. The findings revea! the semantic patterns that are most typically associated to the five most common noun modifiers in English and Spanish, enabling us to determine functional-semantic equivalents between the two languages that will be extremely useful in the field oftranslation.