Colocaciones en islandés y español: un estudio contrastivo con fines lexicográficos y didácticos

Abstract

This research falls within the disciplines of contrastive linguistics, bilingual lexicography, and the teaching and learning of Spanish as foreign language (L2). It focuses on collocations, restricted word combinations that often pose problems for L2 learners as the lexical selection may differ from their L1 (e.g., dar un paseo vs take a walk). Its main aim is to examine the phenomenon in the previously unexplored Icelandic and Spanish linguistic pair, with the following specific objectives: 1) to assess whether the treatment of collocations in the most recent bilingual dictionaries currently used by Icelandic learners is adequate, and 2) to identify similarities and differences between Icelandic collocations and their Spanish equivalents. To achieve the former objective, a phraseographic analysis of the Spænsk-íslensk orðabók (SÍO) (Tulinius et al., 2007) and the Íslensk-spænsk orðabók (ÍSO) (Tulinius et al., 2011) is conducted. Aspects such as frequency of use of the selected collocational repertoire, location, internal ordering and translation equivalents are evaluated according to the role of each dictionary. To fulfill the second objective, a contrastive analysis of an ad hoc corpus of 440 verb-noun collocations of ten frequent Icelandic verbs ―eiga (to have), fara (to go), fá (to receive), gefa (to give), gera (to do), hafa (to have), koma (to come, to arrive), leggja (to put), setja (to put), taka (to take)― is performed. The corpus has mainly been extracted from Íslenskt orðanet (Jónsson et al., 2006-2023). Their Spanish correspondences were catalogued according to a scale of equivalence and noted whether they were part of the previous dictionary‘s collocational repertoire (ÍSO) as well as in the multilingual platform LEXÍA (Úlfarsdóttir & Davíðsdóttir, 2021), where a new dictionary with Spanish as the target language is underway (LEXÍA-SP). Frequency and combinatorial behaviour of such combinations are verified through linguistic corpora of both languages. The findings of the first analysis reveal differences in the treatment of collocations due to the origin of the database and the lexicographical tradition to which each dictionary belongs. Additionally, collocations appear in different locations without a clear justification and are grouped with other phenomena (e.g., idioms and free combinations) in both dictionaries. Endorsed by the data from the second analysis, we also confirmed the absence of frequent collocations in Icelandic, some with significant differences with Spanish and therefore difficult for the user to predict. The results of the second analysis show that the most recurrent phenomenon regarding partial equivalence is related to the determination of the noun, but also highlights a significant number of collocations in the repertoire without equivalence. On the other hand, collocations formed with gera (to do) show the most similarity with Spanish, while those including taka (to take) or fara (to go) present different verbal selections. In addition to a theoretical review of Icelandic collocations, this research contributes in a practical way to expand and specify the lexicographic information between the pair of languages described, as well as to improve teaching techniques and resources. On the one hand, our contrastive study suggests the inclusion of a significant number of collocations in the new dictionary LEXÍA-SP, as well as a review and modification of some entries to cover gaps in translation equivalents. On the other hand, it offers data on potential difficulties that need to be considered when designing teaching materials in the Nordic countries, particularly in Iceland, where Spanish has become the most studied optional L2.