Languages in Contrast - Online First

Drawing on the Lexical Grammar Model, Frame Semantics and Corpus Pattern Analysis, we analyze and contrast verbs of stealing in English and Spanish from a lexico-semantic perspective. This involves looking at the lexical collocates and their corresponding semantic categories that fill the argument slots of verbs of stealing. Our corpus search is performed with the Word Sketch tool on Sketch Engine. To the best of our knowledge, no study has yet taken advantage of the Word Sketch tool in the study of the selection preferences of verbs of stealing, let alone a semantic, cross-linguistic study of those verbs. Our findings reveal that English and Spanish verbs of stealing map out the same underlying semantic space. This shared conceptual layer can thus be incorporated into an ontology based on deep semantics, which could in turn enhance NLP tasks such as word sense disambiguation, machine translation, semantic tagging, and semantic parsing.

A set of phraseological units that convey disagreement in Spanish, English and Norwegian teenage language are observed from three perspectives in this paper: the phraseological, the pragmatic-discursive and the contrastive perspective. The underlying assumption of the analysis is that the expression of disagreement in these terms among young people takes on certain pragmatic nuances. The Madrid Oral Corpus of Teenage Talk (COLAm), the COLT-corpus (Corpus of London Teenage Talk) and the UNO-corpus of Young Norwegian speakers (Ungdomsspråk i Norden, Oslo) enable a comparison of the use of these phraseological units expressing disagreement among teenagers across these three languages.

This study compares the Italian suffix -ista with its English counterpart -ist in terms of productivity. While in English -ist is often used to designate a person who devotes himself to some science or branch of knowledge (linguist), or refers to an adherent of some creed, doctrine, or art (idealist), Italian -ista has extended its use to new meanings (e.g. supporter of a politician, an artist, etc.), and possible bases, from roots to phrases. Moreover, -ista has also extended its applicability to recent loan words and abbreviations, thus becoming more frequent than -ist and often corresponding to the -er suffix (e.g. shampooer vs. shampista) or nominal compounds (e.g. taxi driver vs. tassista) in the formation of agent nouns. The present contrastive (corpus-based and dictionary-based) analyses confirm that -ista is more productive than -ist in terms of possible bases and varied meanings, which have entered the Italian lexicon and are available for the formation of neologisms.