Congruence and equivalence in adjective-forming suffixation in Spanish and English: A contrastive study

Abstract

This study examines the phenomena of equivalence and congruence of English and Spanish suffixes through the implementation of a word-building modelling process (cf. Dunn 2000). The resulting models are useful for grouping the suffixes as regards their underlying logico-semantic relation (LSR) and the word class of bases. The morphological and semantic depiction of their constituents allows for a better understanding of a crosslinguistic analysis of adjectival suffixation in these two languages. The examination of sixty-four suffixes (forty-one in Spanish and twenty-three in English), and 123 morpho-semantic variants (MSVs), or models (sixty-five in Spanish and fifty-eight in English), has indicated that these two languages coincide in most of the logico-semantic relations (fourteen out of twenty-one) expressed through suffixation. However, there also exist some LSRs that are not suffixation-based and whose semantic structures are conveyed through ‘native’ syntactic means.