A contrastive study of verbs of remembering and forgetting in English and Spanish

This article presents a contrastive study of the verbs REMEMBER, FORGET and REMIND and their Spanish equivalents RECORDAR, ACORDARSE and OLVIDAR(SE), from a broad systemic-functional perspective. Through a database built with occurrences obtained from authentic corpora, a quantitative analysis was carried out on these verbs in terms of spoken and written mode and a number of clausal factors: mood, syntax and semantics of the Phenomenon, voice, polarity, person and modality. These factors were considered both individually and in relation to one another. The analysis uncovered similarities in the use of the English and Spanish verbs and, more significantly, a number of differences, due to a diversity of factors such as mode, lexical distribution, grammatical features and type of discourse, as well as politeness and other pragmatic reasons.