English affixal negation translated into Spanish 63
3.3 Tertium comparationis
Due to the nature of the study, the tertium comparationis is translation equivalence.
Here this means an inventory of formal means, both lexical and grammatical, that
functionally account for the negative meanings conveyed by the English affixes
in the target language. The inventory is derived from empirical evidence from a
preliminary analysis of the P-ACTRES corpus data (see Section 3.2). The formal
patterns offered by the translations were first analysed in detail, so as to determine
the degree of delicacy of the labels to be used as a platform of comparison. This
means that in Spanish, for example, prepositional phrase (PrepP) covers combina-
tions with different prepositions (sin, a, con, etc. Eng without, to, with), quantifier/
degree includes resources meaning ‘paucal’ (e.g. poco, Eng little) as well as down-
toners (e.g. menos, Eng less). Most of the resources apply to nouns and adjectives
(less frequently to verbs), but since part-of-speech categorization does not seem to
affect meaning transfer, the labels in our tertium comparationis do not take parts of
speech into account. Table 6 displays the labels identified as tertium comparationis
and which characterize the various translation choices observed. Section 4.2 offers
prototypical examples for each of them taken from P-ACTRES.
Table 6. Tertium comparationis for English affixal negation translated into Spanish
Tertium comparationis Example
Affixal neg In-correcta < improper
Borrowing Topless < topless
Clausal neg No le gusta < dislikes
Lexical neg Ignoró < dismissed
No + (positive) lexical item No adecuados < improper
Ø [...]
Paraphrasing Acto seguido < immediately
Positive lexical item Extraordinariamente < unusually
Prepostional phrase Con crueldad < Unkindly
Quantifier/degree Escasa (Eng scant) actividad < inactivity
- The study
The contrastive study follows the four-tier procedure based on Krzeszowski’s clas-
sical stages (1990): (i) selection, (ii) description, (iii) juxtaposition and contrast,
and (iv) verification of ‘target language fit’ (Chesterman 2004).