English affixal negation translated into Spanish 73
CREA order Absolute freq. Relative freq.
- inútil 4,340 28.44
- incapaz 3,729 24.44
- indispensable 3,547 23.25
- ilegal 3,237 21.21
- increíble 3,208 21.02
- inconsciente 2,701 17.70
- invisible 2,409 15.79
Table 9. Control CREA: negative prefixes, quantitative data
Query item Population (N)
imposible 1,564
desconocido 534
imprescindible 839
inútil 314
incapaz 545
indispensable 284
ilegal 315
increíble 334
inconsciente 376
invisible 301
Total 5,388
These data are necessary for the subsequent testing of the statistical significance of
the occurrences of affixal negation found in the translated Spanish of P-ACTRES.
Lexical negation. Querying for lexical negation was done by identifying lexical
negative items in P-ACTRES and using them as input in our search for frequencies
in CREA. P-ACTRES yielded 48 entries which were later browsed in CREA. Some
of these entries were used recurrently, as for instance carente de + N [Eng lacking
(something)], which was the most common of these recurrent items. Interestingly,
however, there is no evidence that this item is significantly typical in CREA, which
may call its acceptability as a translation solution into question. Another interest-
ing piece of information is that some of the lexical translations convey the opposite
(positive) meaning of the original negative item (e.g. puro; pure < sinless). The 48
entries from P-ACTRES were run against the CREA 10,000-frequency list (see
Table 10) in order to check their position in non-translated Spanish. Only 21 of
these items were represented in CREA, and there is no evidence of any significant
typicality for the remaining entries. As before, only the top ten truly negative items
were used as querying inputs in CREA (see Table 11).