58 Rosa Rabadán and Marlén Izquierdo
Although the behaviour and distribution of resources to express negation in
English and Spanish are typologically practically the same (Zanuttini 2001), in
practice they tend not to be so. From among the various possibilities for conveying
negation in the two languages, namely, negative operators such as not/no, negative
polarity items like never/nunca, lexical items and affixes, the latter are particularly
interesting. While affixal negation is available in both languages, in Spanish it is
used more sparingly than in English, other formal options being favoured.
In order to identify the Spanish resources used as conveyors of the negative
meanings encoded by English affixes, we first explore translated Spanish texts
which serve as diagnostic material (Gellerstam 1996, Mauranen 1999 and 2000).
The diagnostic data come from the ACTRES Parallel Corpus (P-ACTRES), which
contains English source texts and their Spanish target texts.^1 The Spanish corre-
spondences are further tested using the CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español
Actual) monolingual corpus of original Spanish textsas a source of control data.^2
This step is necessary to determine the extent to which translated Spanish and
original Spanish differ in the use of the negative resources. The findings of the
double comparison are analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively and inter-
preted in terms of the effectiveness and appropriateness of cross-linguistic cor-
respondences and of universal translation features (Chesterman 2004, Mauranen
2004 and 2007, Tirkkonen-Condit 2002 and 2004, Toury 2004).
A review of affixal negation in English and Spanish is presented in Section 2.
Section 3 is devoted to the method and procedures used in the study. The empiri-
cal data are compared and extensively analyzed in Sections 4 and 5. The conclu-
sions are presented in Section 6.- Affixal negation in English and Spanish
Before embarking on the search for evidence to test our initial hypothesis that
affixal negation is realised differently in English and Spanish, it is necessary to
review negative affixal resources in both languages, their similarities and differ-
ences and their status as conveyors of negative meanings, the assumption being
that different grammatical traditions may have an influence on the actual distribu-
tion of negative means of expression.- For copyright reasons, P-ACTRES cannot be freely distributed. A sample demonstration is
available at http://actres.unileon.es/inicio.php?elementoID=12 (March 2011). - The contents and architecture of the CREA corpus are described at http://www.rae.es/RAE/
Noticias.nsf/Home?ReadForm (March 2011). The querying interface can be reached at http://
corpus.rae.es/creanet.html (March 2011).