In:Corpus Use in Cross-linguistic Research: Paving the way for teaching, translation and professional communication
Edited by Marlén Izquierdo and Zuriñe Sanz-Villar
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 113] 2023
► pp. 91–107
Chapter 5Exploring near-synonyms through translation corpora
A case study on ‘begin’ and ‘start’ in the English-Spanish parallel corpus PACTRES
Published online: 2 November 2023
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.113.05ram
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.113.05ram
This chapter explores the Spanish translations of the English ingressive verbs ‘begin’ and ‘start’ in the parallel corpus PACTRES. ‘Begin’ and ‘start’ are considered near-synonyms and the aim of this paper is to trace any semantic differences between them through an analysis of their Spanish translations. I obtained the translational options in Spanish for ‘begin’ and ‘start’ and compared the divergences using statistical significance tests. The findings revealed that the verb ‘start’ presents a wider range of ingressive verbs as translational options in Spanish, thus pointing towards a larger number of associated sense relations than the verb ‘begin’. This study illustrates the usefulness of parallel corpora in highlighting semantic differences between near-synonyms in the source language, here English.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical framework
- 2.1Aspectual verbs: ‘Begin’ and ‘start’
- 2.2Synonymy
- 3.Data and method
- 3.1The English-Spanish parallel corpus PACTRES
- 3.2The data
- 4.Results and discussion
- 4.1Comparing syntactic patterns of ‘begin’ and ‘start’
- 4.2Spanish translations of ‘begin’
- 4.3Spanish translations of ‘start’
- 4.4Comparing the Spanish translations of ‘begin’ and ‘start’
- 4.5Spanish ingressive verbs as translations of ‘begin’ and ‘start’
- 5.Conclusions
References
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