English affixal negation translated into Spanish 61
Table 3): e.g. sindiós, Eng godless, but sinsabor, Eng distress, unhappy or sad fact. No
is included in the general inventory as a detachable prefix meaning ‘contradiction’,
i.e. the negation of one of the elements implies that the other is positive, the two
thus becoming mutually exclusive, e.g. a non-violent path, Sp una vía no violenta.
The R.A.E. grammar (2009: 725) considers it an equivalent to clausal negation,
e.g. Sp la elección no es aleatoria, Eng the choice is found to be non-random, a view
shared by a number of experts (Sánchez López 1999: 2566, Varela & Martín García
1999: 5021).
Table 3. Semantics of Spanish negative affixes in standard works
Negative affixes a- des- in- sin no
Contradiction ✓
Contrary ✓ ✓ ✓
Privation ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Reversal and removal ✓
The degree of correspondence between the two languages can be traced to the
Latin origin of many of the prefixes, and the differences to the fact that English
has two additional, very productive, Anglo-Saxon affixes (un- and –less). However,
our research question goes beyond a simple comparison of the affixal capabilities
of the languages as we are interested in how the negative content conveyed by the
English affixes is translated into Spanish.
- Method and procedure
In this section we will discuss the corpora, the use of statistics and the tertium
comparationis.
3.1 Corpora
This study is based on the parallel corpus P-ACTRES (Izquierdo et al. 2008) and
the monolingual corpus CREA (2008). P-ACTRES contributes empirical infor-
mation about translation behaviour concerning our chosen negative items, while
CREA, which acts as a control corpus for non-translated Spanish, provides empiri-
cal information about the actual distribution of the negative resources in Spanish
(Section 4.3.1).
P-ACTRES is a ready-made parallel corpus of English originals and their
translations into Spanish which contains nearly 2.5 million words distributed in