A contrastive analysis of English adjectival compounds and their equivalents in Serbian: Corpus analysis

Abstract

This paper is a report on the results of an inquiry into the similarities and differences between English and Serbian in terms of compound lexemes in adjectival sentential positions. The contrastive relation was established in a one-direction translation from English to Serbian, while the research was based on a specific and diversified collection of English texts and corresponding translations into Serbian. A total of 1584 examples of compound lexemes were registered in the corpus of more than one million words. The translation correspondents and equivalents in the Serbian language were analyzed in terms of their form and the function they perform in the sentence in order to determine the correlation with English counterparts. It was discovered that the formal-semantic content of the compounds in English was transferred into four structural types of equivalents, most frequently into syntagmatic structures or simple adjectives in Serbian. Also, the equivalents in the form of clause were fewer than expected.