Spanish-English Cognates

An analysis of Spanish-English cognates: classification of partial cognates

1. Introduction

What is cognate?

Hall(2002)definecognatesaswordsthat“cansharephonologicaland/ororthographicform,andtypicallyrelatedsemantically.”

Cognatescanbeclassifiedinto3majorcategories:

True friends

Pairs of words that are perceived as similar and are mutual translations.

Ex. animal -animal

False friends

Pairs of words in two languages that are perceived as similar but have completely different meanings

Ex. avocado -abogado

Partial friends

Pairs of words that have the same meaning in both languages in some but not all contexts.

Ex. circulation –circulación

Partial friends |circulation –circulación

Roca (2010) mentioned that semantic overlap occurs when two similar words have at least one shared meaning and at least one different meaning due to polysemicnature of words.

Polysemy is a “single linguistic form with multiple related meanings, which constitutes an important dimension of depth of L2 word knowledge (Nation 2001)”

According to Huang (2004), the different senses of a polysemousword do not always have a clear-cut boundary in their meanings.

Objectives

The aim of this research is to find a way to catalogue English-Spanish cognates appropriately (Spanish and English are considered highly related languages that share many common characteristics even though that they are originally derived from different origin as share many Latin-based words). In particular, partial cognates that often cause misuse of vocabulary in the second language acquisition.

Previous investigations focused more on the recognition of cognates than classification.

Previous studies concentrated on the phonological and morphological aspects rather than semantic level.

Most of students in Korea, learn Spanish after acquiring English. Therefore, English plays an important role.

Most of the textbooks underestimate cognates. Also many learning resources only include concrete cognates.

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