Article

Name: German prefixed verbs with the root morpheme «lass-» and their equivalents in the modern English language

Authors: N. V. Kozlova, M. K. Movchan

Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation; The Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, Sankt-Peterburg, Russian Federation

In the section Linguistics

Abstract: The paper is devoted to the ways of conveying word meanings in German and English. Based on the method of contrastive analysis, these ways of conveying meanings are studied in German separable and inseparable verbs as well as English analytical (mostly V + Adv) constructions. Lexicographic, corpus and etymological analyses of English equivalents of the German prefixed verbs with the root morpheme lass- have allowed us to establish some correlations between German verbs and English V + Adv analytical constructions and work out their classification. The corpus analysis on the basis of the European Parliament Proceedings Parallel Corpus 1996−2011 showed that up to 45 per cent of English analytical constructions correspond with the separable verbs in German and up to 40 per cent with the German inseparable verbs. The comparative corpus and lexicographic analyses showed different results. For example, abandon = verlassen, omit = auslassen, release = ablassen are frequent in the lexicographic analysis, but it cannot be proved by the corpus analysis. This can be explained by the corpus themes – it is based on the official manner. However, we can find the kernel structures which are frequent both by the lexicographic and corpus analyses. First of all, they include German equivalents of English verbs leave and let. The analysis of the German prefixed verbs with the root morpheme lass- showed that English analytical (mostly V + Adv) constructions are very frequent. Meanwhile, we can find more correlations between German separable verbs and English V + Adv analytical constructions than between German inseparable verbs and English analytical constructions. Such a tendency exist first of all in the dictionaries: 61 per cent of English analytical constructions correlate with the German separable verbs. In the European Parliament Proceedings Parallel Corpus 1996−2011, it is only 45 per cent. This can be explained by the fact that the lexemes in the dictionary are given without context.

Keywords: eurysemy, the german language, the english language, analytical construction, analytism, synthetism

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