A morphosemantic investigation of term formation processes in English and Spanish

Abstract

Driven by a shortage of studies on the morphosemantics of word-formation from a contrastive perspective, this article examines 200 English and Spanish terms from the olive oil industry with the aim of shedding light on their linguistic nature. This is achieved by use of a corpus which makes it possible to retrieve the units and their contexts from specialised texts. Besides considering the derivational features of the relevant terminogenesic processes, this investigation considers their semantic characteristics and connects the terms’ formal and meaning aspects. This, in turn, allows observing the close relationship between morphology and semantics in terminological spheres, which is directly linked with the role of these units as a tool for specialised communication. Once the morphosemantic features of the terms have been fully accounted for in English and Spanish individually, a comparison is drawn between the two languages in order to spot and describe similarities and differences.