This manuscript sets forth an in-depth study of competing pairs of prefixes of Greek and Latin origin: hyper- vs. super-, micro- vs. mini-, and poly-vs. multi- from a contrastive Spanish-English perspective. Two major source corpora, the Cor­pus de Referencia del Español Actual for Spa­nish, and the British National Corpus for English were used for the purpose of this research. The prefixes were further analysed within the fra­mework of a corpus of 200 translational equiva­lences, compiled from a lexicographic bilingual source, the Oxford Spanish Dictionary (2003); the results were then corroborated with the use of the prefixed words in a bilingual text-based onli­ne source, Linguee. This research sheds light on similarities and differences between such pairs of prefixes. The present contribution confirms the higher use of prefixation in Spanish. A much more frequent use of Latin prefixes, mainly su­per- and multi-, is attested in both languages. The cross-linguistic study reveals that prefixes seem to overlap semantically and syntactica­lly across Spanish and English. Nevertheless, a representative percentage of Spanish prefixed words contrastively exhibit a non-morphological equivalence in English. Hence, a single different word, or a multiword unit may be used in English where derivational expansion of the base is pre­ferred in Spanish.

Montero-Fleta, B. (2013). Cross-linguistic investigation of Greek and Latin prefixes: Spanish and English contrastively. Onomázein, nro. 27, pp. 269-285.

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