Abstract
This chapter explores the Spanish translations of the English ingressive verbs ‘begin’ and ‘start’ in the parallel corpus PACTRES. ‘Begin’ and ‘start’ are considered near-synonyms and the aim of this paper is to trace any semantic differences between them through an analysis of their Spanish translations. I obtained the translational options in Spanish for ‘begin’ and ‘start’ and compared the divergences using statistical significance tests. The findings revealed that the verb ‘start’ presents a wider range of ingressive verbs as translational options in Spanish, thus pointing towards a larger number of associated sense relations than the verb ‘begin’. This study illustrates the usefulness of parallel corpora in highlighting semantic differences between near-synonyms in the source language, here English.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company