lunes, 26 de agosto de 2013

Lexicalization

Lexicalization is the process through which words express different concepts. This process works in a different way in different languages. That is why, many ideas may be present in only one word in a language but not in another. Think about the word "stride" in English: This word contains not only a notion of  walking, but also a notion of the manner in which someones walks (with long steps or strides). If you want to express the same in Spanish,  you will have to resort to some kind of adverbial complement to express manner, because it is absent in the word "caminar" itself and we have no other synonym that includes this  semantic feature.
The following exercise will help you become aware of this situation. English tends to be a synthetic language which lexicalizes many ideas or notions in a single word. Spanish tends to be "wordier" so being concise in English is sometimes hard to accomplish.
There are two sections:

Lexicalization(verbs), exercise
Lexicalization(verbs), key

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