A First Approach to the Contrastive and Translatological Study of English Phrasal Nouns (EPN) in the Spanish and German Languages through Corpora

For various reasons, phrasal nouns -i.e. start-up, spin off, etc.-often integrate as loan words in the lexical systems of languages other than English where, despite their initial opacity, they often end up showing a more specific range of meanings than in the English language. In this paper we present the results of exploiting online reference corpora of the Spanish and German languages to obtain an initial picture of this phenomenon in both languages. After giving an account of the methodology used for assessing the comparability of both data sets, first results regarding the extension of the phenomenon and the handling of English phrasal nouns in the receiving languages are provided. By interpreting those data, first conclusions are extracted for the construction of a DIY-corpus for the comparative and translatological study of English phrasal nouns in both Spanish and German. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.