Focusing Processes in Spanish and English with Special Attention to Word Order Contrastive Analysis of a Parallel Corpus

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to examine the focus marking devices in Spanish and English with special attention to how these devices influence the word order in both languages. Such contrastive analysis is justified because the word order in Spanish can be determined by the information structure, while in English it depends more strictly on the syntactic functions. First, we will present the theoretical framework related to the focus marking methods in general and in the two languages, then a contrastive analysis of parallel corpora of the two languages will be presented. The corpora are two equivalent texts, as they are the translations of the same (originally French) text in Spanish and English. The work examined is the novel called The Little Prince. The comparison will be carried out by comparing specific examples of the texts. Among the main results, we must highlight, on the one hand, that in the Spanish corpus there were not as many cases of focalization through the modification of the word order as we would expect in the case of a language with free word order. On the other hand, the use of lexical focus marking devices and passive structures predominated in the English corpus, especially in the descriptive, non-dialogic parts.