Exploring a Loan Translation and Its Consequences in an Oral Bilingual Corpus

Journal of Language Contact

article

Barbara E. Bullock¹  Jacqueline Serigos²  Almeida Jacqueline Toribio³ 

[1] Department of French and Italian, University of Texas at Austin;Department of Modern and Classical Languages, George Mason University;Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Texas at Austin

关键词: calques;    loan translation;    frequency;    pattern replication;    corpus;    Spanish;    English;   

DOI  :  10.1163/19552629-bja10027

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Brill

【 摘 要 】

This work applies computational tools that have been used to model loanwords in newspaper corpora to an analysis of a loan translation in an oral bilingual corpus. The explicit goal of the contribution is to argue that a specific collocation found in a corpus of Spanish spoken in Texas, agarrar+NP (e.g., agarrar ayuda), is a loan translation that is calqued on English get+np support verb constructions (e.g., get help). We base our argument on the frequency and the linguistic distribution of the nonconventional usage within and between corpora and on the factors that favor its use. Our findings show that the overall frequency of agarrar is the same in Spanish in Texas as it is in the benchmark monolingual corpus of Mexican Spanish but that it is used differently in the two varieties, a difference that has grammatical, as well as semantic, ramifications.

【 授权许可】

CC BY-NC