Abstract
This manuscript sets forth an in-depth study
of competing pairs of prefixes of Greek and Latin
origin: hyper- vs. super-, micro- vs. mini-, and polyvs.
multi- from a contrastive Spanish-English
perspective. Two major source corpora, the Corpus
de Referencia del Español Actual for Spanish,
and the British National Corpus for English
were used for the purpose of this research. The
prefixes were further analysed within the framework
of a corpus of 200 translational equivalences,
compiled from a lexicographic bilingual
source, the Oxford Spanish Dictionary (2003); the
results were then corroborated with the use of
the prefixed words in a bilingual text-based online
source, Linguee. This research sheds light on
similarities and differences between such pairs
of prefixes. The present contribution confirms
the higher use of prefixation in Spanish. A much
more frequent use of Latin prefixes, mainly super-
and multi-, is attested in both languages.
The cross-linguistic study reveals that prefixes
seem to overlap semantically and syntactically
across Spanish and English. Nevertheless, a
representative percentage of Spanish prefixed
words contrastively exhibit a non-morphological
equivalence in English. Hence, a single different
word, or a multiword unit may be used in English
where derivational expansion of the base is preferred
in Spanish.
