Negation and lexical morphology across languages: Insights from a trilingual translation corpus

• Authors: Bruno Cartoni , Marie-Aude Lefer
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper proposes an exploratory cross-linguistic bird’s eye-view of negative lexical morphology by examining English, French and Italian negative derivational affixes. More specifically, it aims to uncover the French and Italian equivalents of the English affixes de, dis, in, non, un and less. These include morphological equivalents (i.e. negative prefixes in French and Italian) as well as non-morphological equivalents (i.e. single words devoid of negative affixation, multi-word units or paraphrases). The study relies on a nine-million-word trilingual translation corpus made up of texts from the Europarl corpus and shows that the systematic analysis of translation data makes it possible to identify the major morphological dissimilarities between the three languages investigated. The frequent use of non-morphological translations in French and Italian reflects fundamental differences between the source language (English) and the two target lan-guages (French and Italian), hence pointing to possible translation difficulties. Morphological translations, on the other hand, bring to light cross-linguistic similarities in the use of negative affixes.

Keywords

EN

lexical morphology; derivation; negation; multilingual corpora; translation

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 47
• Pages: 795

Dates

published

2011

received

2010-12-01

revised

2011-05-01

accepted

2011-06-20

Contributors

author

Bruno Cartoni

• Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland

author

Marie-Aude Lefer

• Université catholique de Louvain and Institut Libre Marie Haps, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/psicl-2011-0039