Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics - Studies in honour of Stig Johansson

(Joyce) #1

English affixal negation translated into Spanish 75


Table 12. Control CREA: Prepositional phrase (sin + N) data^8


Query ítem Population (N)
sin sentido 69
sin fin 62
sin palabras 60
sin nombre 57
sin vida 55
sin limites 54
sin rostro 25
sin esperanza(s) 23
sin piel 22
sin cabeza 18
Total 445


Clausal negation. In order to obtain evidence of the relative frequency of clausal
negation in non-translated Spanish, the CREA 10,000-item frequency list was que-
ried for high-frequency finite verbal forms (see Table 13). These were combined
with the adverb no and used as querying items for clausal negation in CREA. The
search yielded 103,403 occurrences (see Table 14).


Table 13. CREA frequencies for finite verbal forms^9


CREA order Absolute freq. Relative freq.



  1. ha 380,339 2493.07

  2. son 232,415 1523.45

  3. había 223,430 1464.55

  4. era 219,933 1441.63

  5. está 194,168 1272.74

  6. han 169,718 1112.47

  7. puede 161,219 1056.76
    65. tiene 147,274 965.36
    84. hace 114,507 750.57
    95. dijo 108,471 711.01

  8. English equivalents (of N): sense, end, words, name, life, limits, face, hope, skin, head.

  9. English equivalents: has (< haber), are, had, was (for both era < ser and está < estar), have,
    can, has (< tener), do, say.

Free download pdf