Contrastive word-formation today: Retrospect and prospect

Abstract

This paper proposes an exploratory bird's-eye view of contrastive word-formation research, an area which, to date, remains largely under-researched in the three fields in which it partakes, namely morphology, contrastive linguistics and lexicology. Studies in contrastive word-formation, as well as their meta-analysis in terms of scope, objectives and data, are presented in a critical survey of the literature, together with an extensive bibliography . A new contrastive methodology for future research is looked into and the major practical applications of contrastive word-formation in bilingual lexicography and translator training, among others, are overviewed. Contrastive wordformation, it is argued, should be set within a more rigorous theoretical and methodological framework, which would be characterised by a dynamic conception of the tertium comparationis and the use of empirical data drawn from multilingual corpora.Contrastive word-formation is at the intersection of two major areas: wordformation (which is encapsulated in the broader fields of morphology and lexicology) and contrastive linguistics. 1 It is now gradually emerging as a field of * This paper was first presented at the English Word-Formation in Contrast seminar of the 10th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English (Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy). I am greatly indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the first draft of this paper. 1 Morphology is here viewed as "the branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure, and how they are formed" (Aronoff and Fudeman 2005: 1-2). It is traditionally divided Brought to you by | HEC Bibliotheque Maryriam ET J. Authenticated Download Date | 6/7/15 9:47 AM

Cross-linguistic investigation of Greek and Latin prefixes: Spanish and English contrastively

“…Hamawand (2011) centred on prefixes of degree and negative prefixes. In fact, negative prefixes have been the most frequent focus of research, from the pioneer studies by Jespersen (1917) or Zimmer (1964), to more recent ones: Cortés ( 2006) undertook an English-Spanish contrastive study of negative prefixes; Dzuganova (2006Dzuganova ( , 2008 investigated prefixes in medical English; Lutzky (2004) studied the prefixes dis-, in-, mis-and un-in Middle English; Lefer andCartoni (2011a, 2011b) and Cartoni and Lefer (2011) inquired into negative prefixes in English, French and Italian, contrastively. Intensive prefixes in Spanish were analyzed by Martín García (1988); Andor (2005) undertook research on amplifying prefixes in English and Hungarian.…”

“…Following Lefer (2011), to undertake data comparability, explicit and coherent criteria should be established to reach the designated aim. The tertium comparationis, an explicit specification of the initial comparability criterion (Chesterman, 1998;Lefer, 2011) determines the starting point to establish the similarities and differences between the phenomena compared (Krzeszowski, 1990). Relatedly, the concepts that cross-linguistic studies need are the shared features on the basis of which a cross-linguistic comparison can be made.…”

“…The organization of the paper has the following format: once the theoretical framework has introduced the topic under study in this section, section 2 describes the languages compared from the Greek and Latin prefixation perspective. Section 3 presents the criteria adopted in cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical morphology, an explicit specification of the tertium comparationis or initial comparability criterion (Kreszowsky, 1990;Lefer, 2011). Section 4 introduces the methodology used.…”

“…The word prefix derives from the Latin prae-fixus, 'fixed in front' (from prae, before + figere, 'to fasten' or 'to fix'). Prefixation is a process that incorporates three main fields of study: morphology, contrastive linguistics, and lexicology (Lefer, 2011). Alemany y Bolufer (1920) and Nebrija (1492) were for many years the only referent for studies on Spanish word-formation.…”

Linguistique contrastive et morphologie : les noms en -iste dans une approche onomasiologique

“…Cependant, l'étude contrastive de la morphologie, fondée sur l'analyse systématique de grands corpus, est un domaine de recherche relativement récent (cf. Lefer (2011) qui recense et évalue environ 70 études menées de 1960 à 2010 en morphologie contrastive). Parfois basée sur des groupes d'affixes, comme dans (Devos & Taeldeman, 2004) ou (Andor, 2005), elle permet de mettre en lumière certaines contraintes qui s'exercent lors de l'application de règles dans l'une des deux langues en contraste.…”