False Friends in Learner Corpora

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Acknowledgements

I am sincerely grateful to Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez for his support and guidance during the elaboration of this book. Deepest gratitude is also due to Teresa Fanego Lema (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Carlos Prado Alonso (University of Valencia, Spain), Gaëtanelle Gilquin (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) and Manuel Rubén Chacón Beltrán (University of Distance Learning) for their insightful comments on the previous work which gave way to the present volume. I would also like to thank James Milton and Tess Fitzpatrick from the University of Swansea Wales and Pedro José Chamizo Domínguez and Encarnación Postigo Pinazo from the University of Málaga for providing me with direction and very useful materials and information resources.

I am truly indebted and thankful to Marcos Calaza Montes; his encouragement, patience, tireless support and affection were extremely important to me. And a very special thanks to my parents for their motivation, love and encouragement throughout my whole life.

A final word of thanks for the financial support received from the Spanish Ministry of Education (reference number AP2007–04477), the European Regional Development Fund and the Autonomous Government of Galicia (Directorate General for Scientific and Technological Promotion, grants 2006/14–0, 2008/047, CN2011/011), the General Secretariat for Research and Development of the Autonomous Government of Galicia (reference number: PGIDIT05PXIB20401 PR; INCITE08PXIB204033PR), the European Commission (reference grant: 135507-LLP-1-2007-1-IT-KA2K) and the Galician Ministry of Culture and Education (reference number: 2012-PG073) for financial assistance during the writing process.

Thank you to all these people and institutions. Without their help I would not have been able to complete this book. ← 7 | 8 →

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Abbreviations

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1.   False Friends in Applied Linguistics: Key Issues

1.1   Introduction

Lexis has been long disregarded by language teachers in traditional English classrooms. However, in the last decades of the 20^th century, linguists and researchers started to show a growing interest in the role of lexical acquisition in language teaching which has lasted up to the present (Nation, 1990; Lewis, 1993; Ellis, 1994; Singleton, 1999; Schmitt, 2000; Bogaards and Laufer, 2004). In fact, vocabulary is now considered as a central issue for language learners to be effective and accurate in the communication process. The present study acknowledges the prominent role of word knowledge while analysing the interlinguistic phenomenon of false friends. False friends (FF henceforth) are lexical items in different languages that resemble each other in form but have different meanings (Chalker and Weiner, 1996; O’Neill and Casanovas, 1997; Colman, 2009).

Despite the fact that false friends have a long tradition in language research, these words are a current issue for those learning and working with languages since they can be found in many contexts of our modern life, including the names of public buildings (e.g. French Hôtel de Ville “city townhall”), the titles of famous songs (e.g. Ai se eu che pego¹ “if I catch you”), some road signs (Swedish farthinder “speed bump”), or the daily news (e.g. David Beckham’s career in pictures²). Thus, English headlines, such as “Highly processed foods advertised as “low fat” are often loaded with cheaply added excess sugars and preservatives ← 11 | 12 → ” or “Medical students should have more lectures on nutrition” might cause episodes of momentary confusion among Spanish speakers who are not really proficient in English due to the presence of words such as preservative or lecture. These two English words are very similar and almost orthographically identical to Spanish preservativo “contraceptive rubber” and lectura “reading.” Therefore, if we look into the senses of these words in both languages, we observe that the resemblance is only superficial.

The previous examples are just a symbolic representation of the thousands of situations in which false friends may occur and produce misunderstandings among speakers with different language backgrounds. Such language problems should be detected and avoided. As a contribution to this issue, the present book seeks to identify the linguistic problems having to do with English false friends. Particularly, this monograph presents a corpus-based analysis which aims to determine how English false friends affect the learners’ spoken and written production with a view to preventing and solving any linguistic and communication difficulties derived from the learners’ poor command of English false friends.

Generally speaking, this monograph deals with English false friends, the learning complexity of these words and the occurrence of these lexical items in learner language. However, before going into this in more detail, I will provide some background information on this phenomenon. In this respect, an important question to be considered is the following: why is it that identical words in different languages sometimes have different meanings? The section below provides some important clues which explain the existence of false friends between languages.

1.2   Brief Notes on the Origin of False Friends

A diachronic study suggests that most false friends are etymologically related terms which share a common source. As a matter of fact, a large number of false friends are cognate words (Van Roey, 1985; ← 12 | 13 → Crystal, 1994)³ which came to differ in meaning as a result of certain semantic changes occurring in the historical development of these words over time.

Obviously, languages change through time to adapt to the speakers’ needs and sociocultural contexts; and, vocabulary is the language component which is affected most by these changes. Thus, there are words which started being identical in meaning in various languages and have shifted their original senses through the years. It is the case of the English word lust and German Lust which share a common ancestor and sense, that of “pleasure.” However, the English word underwent specialization and is now used to refer to a “strong (sexual) desire.” If we focus on English and Spanish, we find examples of similar words which have come to have completely different senses with the course of time (English success vs. Spanish suceso); others have extended their original senses through different mechanisms of language change, such as metaphor (e.g. Spanish canguro and English kangaroo) and some others have undergone semantic processes, such as restriction/amplification, metonymy, euphemism, dysphemism, synecdoche, amelioration or pejoration (Chamizo Domínguez and Nerlich, 2002). Two interesting pairs of false friends are Spanish canguro and English kangaroo, and English barbarous and Spanish bárbaro whose semantic differences can be explained by appealing to two different processes: metaphorical amplification and semantic amelioration, respectively (Chamizo Domínguez, 2006: 426–427). In relation to the first pair of words, Spanish canguro and English kangaroo, both nouns refer to the Australian animal which carries its baby in a pouch. However and apart from that, the Spanish noun canguro has also developed the meaning of “babysitter” through metaphorical amplification. This sense is not present in English; thus, these nouns would be considered partial false friends in Spanish and English because they share some senses, but differ in some others. Concerning barbarous and bárbaro, these two adjectives mean “cruel” in English and Spanish. In addition, the Spanish adjective has undergone a process ← 13 | 14 → of semantic amelioration in its historical evolution and at present, it can be also used to mean “fantastic.” This sense is not conveyed by the English adjective. Therefore, there is a semantic asymmetry between English and Spanish which turns these words into false friends.

Although a great majority of false friends between languages have a common ancestor, there are some false friends which are the result of a mere morphological coincidence.⁴ These coincidental false friends, also called “chance pairs” in the literature, are illustrated by pairs of words like Portuguese chumbo vs. Spanish chumbo or English soap vs. Spanish sopa.

Regardless of the origin of these word pairs, all these examples show that word similarities between languages cannot always be trusted since similar words in different languages may have different senses. On the whole, the nature of false friends is deceptive and intrinsically complex.