64 Rosa Rabadán and Marlén Izquierdo
4.1 SelectionOur selection process commences with an examination of negative affixes in the
original English texts and their translations into Spanish. The inventory of English
negative affixes (see Section 1.2) is used as querying input to obtain diagnostic
data. Next we select what and how to query the monolingual CREA corpus so
as to acquire empirical non-translated evidence to verify the ‘target language fit’.4.1.1 Diagnostic data: The P-ACTRES corpus
Our first query, which required substantial exclusion of irrelevant structural com-
binations (mainly comparisons and items that show strong lexicalization, such as
wireless or nevertheless which are no longer negative in meaning), focused on the
English suffix –less combined with any noun or adjective.
Searching for negative prefixes in P-ACTRES was done using the input pat-
terns un-, in- (including variants il-/ir-/im-), dis-, –less and non- combined with any
adjective, noun or adverb. The raw frequencies obtained are recorded in Table 7.
The negative prefix a-/an- was not considered for this diagnostic query for
a number of reasons. First, the fact that many of the items, in both English and
Spanish, are borrowings from the classical languages and are therefore fully lex-
icalized means that they are best classified as lexical negation, as illustrated in
Example (1):
(1) Genetic vestiges of lost mitochondria were first discovered in Entamoeba
histolytica, an anaerobic parasite nested among conventional amoebas in the
eukaryotic tree. (EKAH1E.s173)
Los vestigios genéticos de las mitocondrias perdidas se descubrieron primero
en Entamoeba histolytica, un parásito anaeróbico que se sitúa entre las amebas
convencionales en el árbol eucariota. (EKAH1S.s165)
Second, this prefix is not particularly favoured as a Spanish translation choice, the
only examples being agramatical/Eng ungrammatical (1 case), apátridas/Eng state-
less (1 case), asexuado(s)/Eng sexless (2 cases), atemporal/Eng timeless (1 case), and
atípico/Eng atypical (3 cases). The third and most important reason is the querying
difficulty: our corpora do not offer the possibility to formally distinguish a- (or any
other prefix) as meaning ‘negative’ or otherwise.4.2 DescriptionAccording to the data, the negative prefix un- is more productive than the other
affixes. Not only is it more frequent, it also combines with various grammatical
categories which potentially trigger the use of a wider range of formal resources